Martin Scorsese backs rescue plan for Paris’s La Clef theater as activists herald breakthrough

Martin Scorsese has reiterated his support for Paris community cinema La Clef after it emerged that activists fighting to save the venue have been given the right to buy the venue.

The fight to keep the 50-year-old cinema going has been supported by a host of local filmmakers such as Céline Sciamma, Mathieu Amalric, Léos Carax and Agnès Jaoui, and has also attracted the attention of filmmakers and cinephiles around the world.

“La Clef must remain a cinema,” Scorsese wrote in an open letter on the page of the French newspaper Liberation.

“Why should we worry about the disappearance of another cinema? Because it’s important,” he continued.

“Every room counts; each room bears the traces of all the people who gathered there to see a silent film by Lubitsch, a classic by Souleymane Cissé or the latest film by Paul Thomas Anderson or Alice Rohrwacher, among many other films and retrospectives.

“Think of all the film lovers gathered under the glow of a projector. And the story of La Clef must be preserved all the more preciously because it was brought to life by people who were brought together by a love of film and the freedom that comes with it.”

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

La Clef’s future has been in doubt since 2015 amid plans to sell the building it is housed in by banking group Caisse d’Epargne.

The theater, believed to be the French capital’s only remaining community cinema, is located in the fifth arrondissement on Paris’s Left Bank, once associated with student activism and intellectual and political ferment.

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

A small group of die-hard cinephile supporters lived in the theater 24/7 to prevent it from being taken back.

They continued their activities on a voluntary basis and lobbied the Caisse d’Epargne to enable them to buy the building at a bargain price.

Their efforts – which continued throughout the Covid-19 pandemic – symbolized the struggle to keep cinemas open and preserve public and cultural spaces as developers seek prime locations in the city.

After a long court case by the Caisse d’Epargne, the group was evicted from the building on March 1, 2022.

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

Those efforts paid off and the group announced at a press conference in Paris on Wednesday that an agreement had finally been reached and the first documents triggering the acquisition had been signed.

The collective must collect the asking price of $3.2 million by October 2023. It said it is ready to raise 80% of the total amount and plans to raise the outstanding $662,000 through a crowdfunding campaign.

“I fully support the joint effort to purchase the building to keep the theater going,” Scorsese said in his letter.