Kim’s Video could’ve been a fascinating look at how a legendary video store inspired and influenced cinephiles and future filmmakers — if only the filmmaker documenting it all wasn’t such a gotdamn lunatic. That lunatic’s name is David Redmon, a documentarian and film nerd who — along with his wife Ashley Sabin — crafted this embarrassing salute to both physical media and the titular New York video chain that was a paradise for movie-loving hipsters like Redmon before the stores shut down in the 2010s.
The Kim’s Video and Music chain was run by Yongman Kim, a dry cleaner who did for home video what maverick movie distributor Donald Rugoff did for foreign films back in the ’60s and ’70s. But while Rugoff brought future world-cinema classics to his own New York arthouses, as affectionately chronicled in the 2019 documentary Searching for Mr. Rugoff, Kim took a more renegade approach by making VHS bootlegs of overseas and/or obscure films and offering them for rent.
“We felt like we were above the law,” a former employee said about his days at Kim’s. Redmon definitely takes these words to heart as he goes on a globetrotting mission to find the 55,000-plus tapes and discs that were shipped away after the closure of Kim’s Video. The filmmaker traveled to Salemi, a Sicily commune that received the collection when Kim made a deal with then-Mayor Vittorio Sgarbi, who was looking to turn the village into a hub for cultural tourism. Unfortunately, after Sgarbi left office, an associate who was supposedly in charge of the preservation found himself under investigation for mafia ties — thus the tapes and discs at Centro Kim’s (the name of the Salemi location) began withering away, gathering dust and sustaining water damage.
Kim’s should be a documentary in which Redmon talks to the various parties involved and makes a case that the collection should be in better hands. Instead, he makes his film in a mostly illegal, very batshit manner. Instead of giving a heads-up to the Salemi folk ahead of his arrival, he shows up (without an interpreter) and begins harassing townsfolk, asking people who clearly don’t speak English for the collection’s whereabouts. The place is closed when he finally finds it, but that doesn’t stop him from entering without permission (and this isn’t the only time) by sneaking in an open backdoor.
When he’s not comparing himself to the mavericks and antiheroes he’s seen in various films (he piles on the accompanying film clips, flexing his deep critical knowledge), Redmon mostly becomes a nuisance for the Italians — an ugly American who really misses VHS tapes. “I’m gonna be here for a long time,” he obnoxiously tells the authorities when they first catch him trespassing.
Redmon becomes hellbent on liberating this treasure trove from the clutches of these “disrespectful” Italians, who I’m quite certain would’ve handed the stash over to him if he promised to leave them alone and never come back. He seems more concerned with tailing these people and exposing their alleged shadiness than focusing on the man who started the whole damn thing. When Redmon finally meets up with Kim halfway through the picture, the former video store magnate (who is described by former employees as “scary” and “shadowy”) is now a mild-mannered, Jersey-based traveling businessman with bygone aspirations of becoming an independent filmmaker.
Anyone who knows about this saga is well aware of the happy ending that lies in store (pardon the pun) for all these precious cinematic goodies. But getting to that jubilant climax means you have to plow through Redmon acting like an even more self-righteous Nick Broomfield, going on an obsessive, cringe-worthy quest that reeks of delusion and self-centeredness. He doesn’t get into what really made video stores like Kim’s obsolete — the rise of video-on-demand and streaming platforms like Netflix. (Though he does give us a close-up shot of the Netflix logo on a New York street ad.)
While Kim’s Video may open the floodgates for other documentaries on legendary video stores (I would love to see a doc on Evergreen Video, the Manhattan shop where late rock critic/Rolling Stone editor Paul Nelson was a proud employee), I hope future films will be more considerate and less condescending. And hopefully, not directed by a possibly unhinged person who gives cinephiles a bad name.
