This article appeared in the September 6, 2024 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

This piece is the first in a new Film Comment series called Light Work, which features articles and interviews about the intersections of labor and film culture and the stories of cinema workers around the world.

Patrons lining up for a screening at La Clef. Photo courtesy of the La Clef Revival collective.

Last June, a victory message appeared on the @laclefrevival account on Instagram. Under an image of raised fists holding keys, red and black lettering announced, “On a réussi. La Clef est sauvée” (“We succeeded. La Clef is saved”). For those of us following the La Clef Revival collective’s five-year campaign to prevent the closure of the cinema, it seemed a miraculous denouement to a long, arduous, and, finally thrilling journey.

La Clef is a community cinema in the Latin Quarter of Paris, an area dotted with universities. The cinema’s four-and-a-half decade history as a beloved neighborhood institution seemed to face an unceremonious end in 2018, when its owners put the building up for sale—until a collective of the cinema’s workers and local activists occupied the theater, refusing to let it close down. Their occupation lasted for nearly two-and-a-half years, during which time their initial act of refusal grew into something bigger and richer. While they waged a legal and media battle to save the cinema, La Clef became the site of a “permanent festival,” with free, daily screenings that drew filmmakers like Céline Sciamma and Leos Carax. The occupiers were evicted in 2022, but the collective’s campaign to save La Clef was far from over: they decided to try and buy the cinema, launching an ambitious fundraising campaign that Martin Scorsese supported with a video message and Quentin Tarantino with a handsome contribution. On June 19 of this year, they succeeded, and La Clef is now a collectively owned, community-run cinema in the heart of Paris, slated to reopen next year after renovations.

It’s a beautiful new chapter in a story that began in 1973, when Claude Frank-Forter opened the theater as a space to share the work of underrepresented filmmakers from across the world with the public. Frank-Forter found the location on Rue de La Clef to be apt—La Clef means “the key” in French. “For me, a key represents a mythical, almost magical object, because its etymology in various languages ​​describes either a thing that allows you to limit access, or the opposite … to open it widely,” he said in a 2019 interview. “This corresponded perfectly to my conception of art-house cinema, which obviously does not interest everyone but which can provide great satisfaction to those who appreciate its characteristics!” In the 1980s, amid a crisis for independent cinemas in France—Frank-Forter attributed it in part to the rise of color television—La Clef was bought by the Works Council of the Caisse d’Épargne d’Île de France, who turned the building into a cultural center. Under the Council’s aegis, two of La Clef’s three screening rooms were made available for films, and from 1990 to 2017, the cinema developed a strong identity as a bastion for cinema from Africa and Latin America, particularly under the curatorial auspices of the Beninese filmmaker Sanvi Panou, who founded the “Images of Elsewhere” program at La Clef.

For the La Clef Revival collective, the goal was not just to save the building, but to honor this legacy of independent, internationalist, and noncommercial moviegoing. If their story struck a chord in Paris and around the globe, it’s because it is familiar to many of us: just as in most major cities, ever-soaring real-estate prices had continually whittled away space for any cultural activities divorced from a profit motive.

Earlier this summer, I spoke with collective members Kira Simon-Kennedy and Chloé Folens about the lessons they’ve learned from the success of the La Clef Revival campaign. Here are their key (pun intended!) insights, as told to me, with some editing and condensation for length and clarity.

Key 1: Fight for cinema as a cultural good

Those who stayed in the cinema during those two-and-a-half-years emphasized that it was not a squat, but an occupation, with the aim of reopening the cinema to the public. It was a means of drawing attention to the fact that cultural institutions were being asphyxiated in Paris because of the rising price of real estate. During the takeover, the space became its own thriving hub. On the first night, September 21, 2019, the collective screened Cinda Firestone’s 1974 documentary Attica, which offers an account of the Attica Prison Uprising of 1971. The police came by that evening, but they thought the cinema had reopened—they didn’t realize that what was happening was actually against the law!

When the pandemic began and the city went under lockdown, we began to use the space for other projects. We started a residency, Studio 34, to train new young filmmakers: someone brought a camera; someone brought on a friend who was a sound engineer, and it just came together. A pirate radio station was launched; film workshops were organized for children. Gradually, we realized that the issue was not only to save the cinema itself, but to try and save all that had been invented within it during the takeover—the experimentation that flourished. There are programmers, scholars, and film professionals within the collective, but we also have a psychiatrist, a baker, a physician. It’s a communal space for organizing, and some have found that to be their main drive to join the collective.

So at a certain point, things shifted from, “we would take any buyer, as long as they guarantee that La Clef remains a cinema,” to “why not buy the cinema ourselves and have it be a self-organized, independent, autonomous, and community-run space?”

Key 2:  It helps if you live in a country with a social safety net 

There was a major economic crisis during the pandemic in France, but it wasn’t the same as in the U.S., with people immediately losing their jobs and health insurance, and possibly getting evicted. That already gave us a base of stability. Then, the Intermittents du Spectacle system for cultural workers in France [a tax and unemployment assistance program for freelance artists] basically guaranteed a baseline of sustenance during the pandemic. Also, many of us are middle and upper class. And finally, though all the screenings had pay-what-you-wish ticketing, the average ticket revenue was about 4.5 euros throughout the occupation. So there was always a revenue stream coming in, quite a significant amount, to cover the basic expenses.

All of this played a role in helping us carry out such a time-consuming struggle, but the current, repressive political environment in France makes it nearly impossible for people in greater danger of encounters with the police—due to class, race, ethnicity, or immigration status—to take part in an occupation. Turning the space into one that can operate legally is part of our effort to welcome everyone into La Clef safely.

Key 3: Use movies to bring together people (and hoodwink the police!)

It’s quite unusual for a squat of this size to last two and a half years, especially in this area of Paris. It’s because it was a beloved space to begin with. It’s also an interesting and historic neighborhood that’s gentrifying, but which still has a strong middle-class identity. People are attached to established institutions and care about the neighborhood staying affordable.

The threat of eviction became imminent in 2022—we had exhausted all possible legal resources, and the police could have come at any point to throw us out. But, you cannot legally be evicted at night in France. So we organized a festival that lasted all day, every day, with screenings starting at 6 a.m. and ending at night. The bet we made was that if there were spectators in the building starting at 6 a.m., that would deter the police. And that worked for five weeks. We had full houses all day. Filmmakers also came to show their films at dawn. Students and cinephiles came from far away, taking night buses from distant neighborhoods to be there on time. Then one night, we found out that we were going to be evicted the next morning. There was no delaying it anymore. We had planned to show [Agnès Varda’s] Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962) that morning, but we decided not to open the theater to avoid putting spectators in danger. But when we briefly reopened for four days in June 2024, to celebrate our purchase of the cinema, our first screening was Cléo from 5 to 7 at 6 a.m.

Key 4: Court small and big donors

After a two-and-a-half year legal battle, it was public and press support that bought us time to negotiate with the owners and raise funds to purchase the building. The initial sales price for the building was 4.2 million, not including the notary fees, architects’ fees, and lawyers fees. Thanks to the negotiation team, the cost came down to 2.7 million euros. The crowdfunding was the biggest source of funds for the purchase of the building. Kira helped set up a fiscal sponsor in the U.S., so we could take donations through Film Independent in Los Angeles. We raised $400,000 from 5000 small donors through this campaign. We also had a beautiful art exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo in October 2022, where a lot of creatives donated works—both big names and emerging artists, keeping with the spirit of La Clef. It was called “Everything Must Go,” a big group show that we treated like a fire sale. The next biggest chunk, $800,000, was from two separate bank loans from cooperative unions. The other slices came from major donors, some who are anonymous, and some who are famous and wanted to be named. The donations were all no-strings-attached—no special treatment for anyone, no matter how much they gave.

Key 5: Build independence and democracy into your organizational structure

We wanted to find a legal way to sustain this self-organized model and the independence of the cinema for years to come. We took inspiration from the ZAD de Notre-Dame-des-Landes, a Zone to Defend campaign in the west of France, where a huge occupation effort resulted in the government abandoning plans to build an airport on agricultural land. They thought through how to make sure that everything that was invented in the context of that struggle could be maintained, and especially how the land could be owned collectively. For that, they’ve made sure that specific uses of the property were required to use the endowment funds—it has to be a collective farm; it has to be organic.

We did the same thing. We created a fund called Cinema Revival. It not only allowed us to collect tax-deductible donations, but also to write a certain number of principles into the use of the building. It has to remain a cinema, and if, for instance, there’s a catastrophe and we can’t repay the loans, the building has to be sold to someone who uses it as a cinema, and it cannot be sold for a profit. It’s a way of despeculating the value of real estate. Also, there are two separate bodies involved in the cinema: the fund [which is managed by professionals including Sciamma; Laurent Tenzer, a representative of the collectively-run Nova Cinema in Belgium; commons expert Eric Arrivé; and Jean-Marc Zekri, head of the Paris arthouse cinema Le Reflet Médicis] and the collective. The resale of the building would require the agreement of a majority of both parties—a way to foolproof the longevity of the space by not concentrating power in any one group. [Learn more about this structure here.]

La Clef also has to remain community-run and independent. It has to have solidarity pricing. It has to be collectively programmed, which is very important because we want it to remain a place that’s open to different sensibilities. And it has to be mostly volunteer run—we will have only two salaried positions, for admin and finance, when we reopen. That’s a way to keep the power dynamics equitable, and to make sure that there’s an opportunity for anyone to come in and learn. There should be an open loop between the people who program and the people who are watching the films.

Key 6: Separate programming from profit

We have two screening rooms and a multipurpose hall we use for conferences, readings, etcetera, but there are also several narrow, poorly lit spaces that no one knew how to use what to make of. Then we realized that they’re perfect for film and sound editing! When we reopen, those will be available to rent, particularly for shorts films and self-produced films—projects with more fragile economies. That will hopefully be a secure source of income, so that the pressure of having to bring in money does not fall on the volunteers who program the films. We want people to choose films based on their love for them, not on the prospect of drawing crowds or making profits.

Key 7: Remember—it’s possible!

If anyone says that something like this can’t be done, you can just say, this place in Paris did it. We of course had our own circumstances, but it’s possible. We got that “it can be done” energy from other such initiatives, too—we are part of a network, called Kino Climates, of alternative cinemas in Europe.

And finally, trust the audience and the collective experience of moviegoing. It’s not just about the consumption of cultural content. That’s what’s been so inspiring about this experience: you allow the audience members to imagine that they could find themselves on the other side at one point, and they could be the ones sharing a film.