Kim's Video

A 2023 documentary about the famed video store which resided in Downtown Manhattan. Having never gone but a close friend would rent the occasional cinematic oddity (he once got me a copy of the workprint for John Woo's Hard Target) from there which due to the tenor of the times went the way of the dodo (like most other video stores) but what kept customers coming back again & again was the eclectic selection they provided but when time came for the business to shutter its doors & its acolytes were worried where the treasure trove of filmic ephemera would go, a surprising wrinkle to the story emerged, as evidenced by the filmmaker, David Redmon. Redmon learned the entire collection would be shipped off to a remote town in Italy under the agreement they would curate the films as an exhibition for travelers to see & even extend a courtesy to former customers who still wanted to rent the occasional vid to make a pilgramage for that purpose. To Redmon's horror when he did manage to find the facility which housed the tapes, water was leaking on some of them from the ceiling & no straight answer was given as to what was going on. What follows is a months long gambit for Redmon to track down 'the' Mr. Kim (who lived in New Jersey & was an aspiring filmmaker in his own right), the custodians of the collection & see if a new deal to bring the tapes back to America could be brokered. Starting off as a proper tribute to a by gone era soon morphs into the loopiest heist escapade any doc has ever seen w/the audience ringside to see the lunacy play itself out.

The actual story of Mr Kim and how this eclectic film collection ended up in a sleepy Sicilian village is fairly interesting, but the director/narrator is grating and had to insert himself as a major part of this documentary. His voice just keeps droning on, name-dropping movies where ever possible. To be honest, the guy made me think of a real life Abed from community (I know, now I had to go and drop a pop culture reference myself) , just less charming. I can see this aspect being a major turn off for a lot of people so I could not recommend this to anyone but people with a real niche interest in this kind of thing.

I just saw it at Thessaloniki Documentary Festival and I have this magnificent feeling when I experience something so overwhelming. I want to rate it because it s a pity this movie to have so mediocre ratings and to help with my comment other people that love movies to go ant see it.

It s an hommage to the cinema. The story is so unbelievable. Besides that, the directors did a fantastic job. There was not just a single moment of boredom. There were moments that all the cinema laughed. One of the best documentaries I have ever seen and I see a lot. In my hometown Thessaloniki festival I saw 40. Go see it. Thank me later 😎

I'm not from New York. Each city had one of these cult-service video stores. My city had Eddie Brandt's Saturday Matinee, which closed permanently during Covid with rumors that Quentin Tarantino actually bought out the archive, presumably to avoid what happened with Kim's. Before the internet these stores were essential for students of film and those in seek of entertainment outside the restrictive limits of Blockbuster. With fond memories of the days of video rentals, I got emotionally invested in the fate of Kim's videos and watched until the very end to see what happened to the artifacts so beloved by so many people. Folks too young to have known anything other than the endless resources of streaming and the internet might not understand...

"But life isn't like the movies. It's more strange."

This documentary chronicles the quest to find and reclaim the collection of movies (on VHS and DVD) from a now defunct video store in New York. It goes from New York, to Italy, Korea and back to Texas. It is the personal journey of a passionate film aficionados that track the collection and through a cinematic escape plan, re-release it to all cinephiles that can travel to its physical location.

I don't want to say more about the plot but, the filmed footage combined with footage from movies (covering almost the full spectrum of cinema) is perhaps an emotional visual essay about the physical format and the accesibility that it provides to film lovers.

It also works as a great adventure/heist film but in the end it's an act of film activism that you to see it, to believe it... I became aware of Kim's video as a New York relic of the '90s in the new Darren Aronofsky movie "Caught Stealing". The physical location was recreated for the purposes of that movie.

The filmakers of this documentary didn't get caught and they weren't practically stealing but got there in the end.

Life is strange, indeed.