Martin Scorsese Gets Behind Rescue Plan For La Clef Cinema In Paris As Activists Announce Breakthrough

Martin Scorsese has re-voiced his support for Paris’s La Clef community cinema, following news that activists fighting to save the venue have secured the right to buy the site.

The battle to keep the 50-year-old cinema up and running has been supported by a raft of local cineastes, such as Céline Sciamma, Mathieu Amalric, Léos Carax and Agnès Jaoui, and also captured the attention of filmmakers and cinephiles worldwide.

“La Clef must remain a cinema,” wrote Scorsese in an open letter posted on the site of France’s Libération newspaper.

“So, why should care in one more movie theatre disappears? Because it matters,” he continued.

“Every theatre matters; Every theatre bears the traces of all the people that have come together to watch a Lubitsch silent, Souleymane Cissé classic, or the latest film from Paul Thomas Anderson or Alice Rohrwacher, among countless other films and programs of titles.

“Just think of all those convocations of film lovers, sitting under the light of the projector beam. And the history of La Clef must be guarded all the more preciously because it was actually brought back to life by people who came together for the love of cinema and the freedom that comes with that love. “

Scorsese’s open letter comes on the eve of his upcoming trip to France for the world premiere of Killers Of The Flower Moon at the Cannes Film Festival in May.

The future of La Clef has been in doubt since 2015 due to plans to sell off the building in which it is housed by the Caisse d’Epargne banking group.

Billed as the French capital’s sole surviving community cinema, the theatre is situated in Paris’s Left Bank fifth arrondissement, once associated with student activism and intellectual and political ferment.

The Caisse d’Epargne banking group shut down the cinema in 2018 but activists, operating under the banner of La Clef Revival Collective, reoccupied the building in September 2019.

A small band of die-hard cinephile supporters lived in the theatre round the clock, to prevent it from being repossessed.

They kept its activities going on a voluntary basis while lobbying the Caisse d’Epargne to allow them to acquire the building at a favorable price.

Their efforts – which carried on throughout the Covid-19 pandemic – came to symbolize the fight to keep cinema-going alive as well as preserve public and cultural spaces in the face of developers on the hunt for prime city sites.

Following a prolonged legal procedure by the Caisse d’Epargne, the group were expelled from the building on March 1, 2022.

La Clef Revival Collective did not give up and continued to raise funds and lobby the Caisse d’Epargne to sell them the site.

These efforts paid off and the group announced at a press conference in Paris on Wednesday that a deal had finally been done and it had signed the first documents setting the acquisition in motion.

The collective needs to gather the asking price of $3.2 million by October 2023. It said it had ready raised 80% of the total sum and plans to collect the outstanding $662,000 via a crowdfunding campaign.

I strongly and fully support the efforts of the collective to purchase the building, thus keeping the theatre in operation,” said Scorsese in his letter.