Underground Paris
In a secret Paris cavern, the real underground cinema
“Police in Paris have discovered a fully equipped cinema-cum-restaurant in a large and previously uncharted cavern underneath the capital’s chic 16th arrondissement.”
French cinephiles going underground
“It all started in the 1980s. We were 500, maybe 1000 people, and we went under Paris to express ourselves as artists. We did everything - from dance festivals, theatre, artists’ happenings, exhibitions. We had a free kingdom underneath Paris, and the places there are really closed places, secret places.
“We are not considered a menace by the Paris police, because they prefer to have some people down there as a kind of control. If there were bad people down there, then we would know about it. With us, it is like a game with the Paris police. Relations with them are not so bad.”
Clandestine group reveals how it built its cinema beneath the city
“La Mexicaine de la Perforation, a clandestine cell of ‘urban explorers’ claims its mission is to ‘reclaim and transform disused city spaces for the creation of zones of expression for free and independent art’…
“Most of the LMDP’s underground happenings are organised in places the city authorities are not aware of, he added. ‘There are so many underground networks - the quarries, the metro, the collective heating, the electricity, the sewers - and each is the responsibility of a different bureaucracy. Urban explorers are the only people who, between us, know it all. We move between each network. We know where they link up - often, it’s us who made the link. The authorities, the police, town hall, they don’t know a hundredth, a thousandth, of what’s down there.’”