Kim's Video
                         
Director: David Redmon, Ashley Sabin
Year: 2023
Rating: 7.50
This is a well-done documentary about the legendary video store that resided in the East Village of Manhattan. But it goes far beyond just nostalgically reciting the rise and fall of the video store in the age of digital. The director (s) takes an active role in the story - one that takes an enormous set of balls and an obsessive personality. He makes this clear in his narration - he is obsessed with film to a perhaps unhealthy degree. He sees the world through films that he has seen - once he drove to Austen to visit fictional characters from a film. He moved to NYC from Texas to be near movies and found Kim's Video Store. It was an amazing place for movie lovers. I went there a number of times but living in Brooklyn I was not a renter but a buyer of films you could not find anywhere else - in my case mainly Japanese films, Bootlegs, mind you.

 

The store was opened by Mr. Kim - a name everyone knew but few knew anything about him or ever saw him. A Korean immigrant who came to NYC when he was 21, opened a laundry store - rented tapes from it and then opened up Kims. He too was an obsessive and brought in films from all over the world. Bootlegs and legit. It got up to 55,000 films. And then like most video rental stores it got hit by the digital age and even though thousands of its films could not be found anywhere else but Kim's, business slacked off and Mr. Kim decided to shut down. But what to do with the 55,000 films - much of it vhs tapes. He gets an offer and promise from the town of Selemi in Sicily. Mafia country. The town promises to maintain the collection, digitalize them, make them available on-line. When the videos arrived, it was a big deal in the town - officials showed up, Mr. Kim went and they showed him how it was going to be organized. That was in 2008.

 

This is where the documentarian enters the story 12-years later. He makes it sound like something out of the Third Man - suspenseful, nervy, scary and amazing. He visits Salemi, finds the place where the videos are being kept, finds an unlocked door, walks in, no one is around and it is a mess. Not open to the public. Videos everywhere, unorganized, certainly none digitalized, water leaks falling on some. He digs deep - he is obsessed with saving these films - many impossible to find elsewhere - and runs into bureaucracy, disinterest and the mafia. The town is Mafia run. Then he tracks down the mysterious Mr. Kim who says come to Seoul and we can talk. He does. He tells Mr. Kim what has happened to his collection and persuades him to come to Salemi. Kim is pissed at what he sees but says there is nothing I can do. The director and his friends say, fuck that - convince the town officials that they are shooting a film at Kim's and one night steal a big chunk of the collection and ship it back to NYC. And then negotiate to get the rest later with Mr. Kim. And reopen Kims. Where rentals are free. An amazing story. Not sure how much if any of this was dramatized for narrative purposes but damn what a story.