After months of talks, the key to La Clef cinema is finally in the hands of the La Clef Revival cooperative, which had been struggling for several years to buy back the Parisian cinema, a historic venue in the Latin Quarter that had officially closed in April 2018. La Clef will have a program unrelated to weekly releases and pay-what-you-want admission.

The cinema's survival was uncertain right up to the last moment. The first purchase agreement, signed on April 26, 2023, with the owner of the site, a subsidiary of the Caisse d'Epargne Ile-de-France bank, was due to expire at the end of October 2023. It had to be extended for a further six months, to allow time to raise the missing funds. Following a final series of negotiations, mainly to secure a bank loan, the sale took place at the notary's office on Monday, June 17.

In a rare move, the owner agreed to reduce the sale price from €2.9 million to €2.35 million, notably because of the work required to bring the 800-square-meter space up to standard and renovate it. It also took the support of two banks, Crédit Coopératif and La Nef, as well as a major donation and sponsorship campaign (totaling €1.8 million) to raise the necessary funds.

To celebrate the news, La Clef will be holding screenings from June 27 to 30, prior to the start of construction. The official reopening is scheduled for June 2025. The cinema will have two screening rooms (120 and 60 seats), two image and sound editing rooms (which will be rented out to bring in further revenue), and a community café. The films to be shown will be catalog works (having completed their run), unreleased films, shorts or features with no distributor, and so on.

Claire-Emmanuelle Blot, an active member of La Clef Revival and a programmer at various festivals, said: "Throughout the process, we worked in total transparency with the financial players: La Clef will not be a cinema like the others. This associative venue will be run by volunteers, with the addition of two permanent salaried employees, one responsible for security and technical management, the other for administration and accounts. Other associative cinemas, such as the Univers in Lille, will be able to contribute to the programming, organize a festival lasting a few days."

While ticket prices are left to the discretion of spectators, the usual tax, known as "TSA" (tax on the price of admissions to screenings organized by the operators of cinematographic entertainment establishments), at around 10% of the ticket price, will be paid to the National Centre for Cinema and the Moving Image, in order to participate in the ecosystem of cinema financing.

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