Paris, year 2004. Police accidentally discover an underground tunnel under the Trocadero; beyond a sign forbidding entry for phantom works, a video camera films anyone passing by, and a photocell triggers a recording of barking dogs to deter intruders.
At the end of the gallery in a vast cavern they find a perfectly equipped cinema with a huge screen surrounded by an amphitheater, a film library, a well-stocked bar-restaurant, professional electrical circuits and a network of telephone lines. On the ceiling, symbols of all kinds, from swastikas to Stars of David.
The lair of a secret society? An investigation opens, three days later investigators return to the site. And there is nothing left: the cinema has disappeared, the cavern is empty, on the floor an inscription: "Ne nous cherchez pas" (Don't look for us).
For two years no one finds an explanation. Then Lazar Kunstmann of the artist group La Mexicaine De Perforation reveals that he is one of those responsible for the ghost cinema.
And he recounts: in 1981, a group of high school students began to study and explore the dense network of tunnels and catacombs that make it possible to go more or less anywhere from underground in Paris, and they procured plans of the many underground passages.
Information that leads in great secrecy to the birth of UX (Urban eXperiment), an organization composed of about 150 artists, architects, historians, and computer scientists divided into several teams: one of only women (the Mouse House) specializing in infiltration enters museums after closing, finds underground routes and eliminates alarms, one manages an encrypted radio network, one deals with a database, one with photography, one (the UnterGunther) with restoration, and one (La Mexicaine De Perforation) organizes underground underground art events.
It is to the latter that Operation Phantom Cinema is owed. Common goal, to use and at the same time preserve public spaces and monuments neglected or forgotten by administrations.
The UnterGunthers, for example, carry out a restoration project in secret every year; like the one in 2007 when for months they worked hidden in the Panthéon to repair a historic clock; then on Christmas night they announced their action by ringing the monument's bells in a distant air.
A special police unit has been futilely hunting them for some fifteen years; even today Kunstmann, the spokesman, is one of the very few known members of the UX, who somewhere, we don't know where, are in full swing as a modern Court of Miracles in the underbelly of Paris . And fortunately they are “underground angels” and not a terrorist group.