Volunteer Collective Reopens Paris Art‑House Cinema La Clef

La Clef, a long-running art-house cinema in Paris’s Latin Quarter, reopened on Jan. 14 and is now run by a collective of volunteers who operate the venue on a donation basis. The theater closed in 2018 after its owner, the Caisse d’Epargne bank, put the building up for sale. Former employees and supporters formed a collective that squatted the site from 2019, organising free daily screenings that drew more than 25,000 attendees before a police eviction in March 2022.

A broad fund-raising drive, supported by more than 5,000 donors and contributions from filmmakers including Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese and David Lynch, allowed the collective to buy the building for nearly 3 million euros in June 2024 and undertake 18 months of restoration work, including asbestos removal, a new cafe and rentable production studios.

For its reopening the collective programmed the Sudanese documentary 'Talking about Trees'; La Clef’s two screening rooms, which seat about 120 and 60 people, filled quickly and many would-be viewers were turned away. The cinema now bills itself as Paris’s only volunteer-run venue, with no fixed ticket prices, and plans a program of boundary-pushing, often political works – including a documentary on Colombia’s FARC, a visual essay by Jonas Mekas and a series of shorts by Palestinian directors.

Key Topics

Culture, La Clef, Latin Quarter, Caisse D'epargne, Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese