La Clef Survival
I found out about cinema La Clef from my friend Miruna at the beginning of 2020, when I was just moving to Paris to study at the Sorbonne on a scholarship. I was living just five minutes away from it, so I quickly made a habit of going downstairs every evening to catch the eight o’clock screening. I wasn’t really sure what à prix libre meant, so in the beginning, I’d also leave some Romanian coins in their donation box at the entrance. Then, the pandemic arrived and I had to move out of the neighborhood, but I came back as soon as the confinement was over, sometime in May, with the goal of seeing at least two to three films a week until the end of the summer (which I did). After the first waves of the pandemic, I was in Bucharest for a short period of time, and then in Venice, only for me to return to Paris. I joined the La Clef Revival collective as a volunteer in October 2021, on a Wednesday, when the regular meetings are scheduled, and it was only then that I gradually started to understand what was actually behind our peaceful occupation. I had some calmer days, in which I found out how the association functions, about our partnership with the schools in the neighborhood for the ”La petite évasion” workshop dedicated to children, and about Studio 34, the independent laboratory that acts as a production company for young filmmakers. I spent many hours at La Clef at reunions and screenings, the morning of my birthday, Christmas Eve and Evening, and I even ended up curating a couple of screenings (The Applause Man by Ruben Vermeersch, Acasă, My Home by Radu Ciorniciuc, Les sorcières de l’Orient by Julien Farault și Belladonna of Sadness by Eiichi Yamamoto). Throughout this entire time, the so-called SOS Associated Group was threatening the collective that it would be evacuated from its building, which was owned by the Caisse d’Epargne Ile de France bank. An event which came to pass on the 1st of March 2022, but the mobilization goes on, with our plan to buy Cinema La Clef through the Revival fund. Personally, I still have my copy of the key which opens the door to Rue Daubenton 34, an upcoming screening of Fabrizio Terranova’s Donna Haraway: Story Telling for Earthly Survival in expectancy, as well as a cute ongoing correspondence with Flavia Dima.
Tatiana Moise is an alumn of UNARTE Bucharest's department of History and Theory of Arts, and is an independent art worker. She is working on a research proposal about the video installations of Chantal Akerman at the Sorbonne and is a French teacher in her spare time. She wishes she could be a vegan, but is much rather a vegetarian.
