Kim’s Video opened theatrically in select theaters on April 12th and will soon expand throughout the US and Canada.
By Elazar Abrahams
Throughout much of the 90s, a small boutique video rental store nestled in the East Village captured the imagination of New York cinephiles. Kim’s Video and Music housed a legendary collection of over 50,000 titles, many of which were rare finds and bootlegs. Then, in 2008, the mysterious owner, Yongman Kim, boarded up his store and gave the collection away.
A new documentary named after the shop is now in theaters, and unfortunately, it doesn’t quite do justice to the legacy of Kim and the underground culture the store helped facilitate in the Big Apple. However, maybe a disjointed at its history actually fits the subject matter.
As a pop culture obsessed New Yorker who only came of age in a world where Netflix was putting places like Blockbuster out of business, I hoped the film would give me an overview of Kim’s Video’s impact on a generation of city dwellers. After all, filmmakers like Todd Phillips and Alex Ross Perry were among the notable staff members who graced the St. Mark’s Place storefront. How had working at Kim’s spurred a greater love of the medium? What were some of the craziest titles stocked on the shelves? How did all of this spin out of what was once an immigrant’s dry cleaning business? The doc does provide brief answers in its first act but quickly becomes exclusively about co-director David Redmon’s own personal experience with the store and his quest to track down the current whereabouts of the donated collection.
It should be an interesting tale, as the tens of thousands of tapes were given to a town in Sicily, Italy, in a deal Kim himself signed off on. His one stipulation was that current members of the video store would be able to access the collection at any time, should they happen to find themselves overseas, and the boatloads of VHSes must remain on view and available for the public to borrow. As Redmon flies across the world to discover, the local government of Salemi did not uphold their end of the bargain. While this could make for thrilling content, even at 85 minutes long, this project feels anything but brisk. The use of vintage film clips to illustrate the narrator’s points is an engaging choice and definitely on theme, but it also detracts from the investigative nature of the piece. Overall, the documentary is quirky but hanging together by a thread, much like Kim’s whole downtown enterprise was.
Thankfully, the collection is now back in the city that never sleeps, and in the hands of film buffs that are insistent on keeping the movies available for rental. In 2022, the Alamo Drafthouse theater in downtown Manhattan came into possession of Kim’s vast catalog, and most of the tapes and DVDs are now available to borrow for completely free, displayed in a section of their lobby that tries to recreate the old video store feel. My day job office in the financial district is just a couple minutes away from Alamo, so I ventured over there one afternoon to check out the space for myself.
Sure enough, a small neon sign bearing the name “Kim’s Video” greeted me in the basement of 28 Liberty Street. It’s taken the dedicated folks at the Drafthouse 3 years to parse through all of the inventory, and they still aren’t finished. There’s more than enough to pick from though, and many titles have hand-drawn covers and irreverent stickers on them from employees of old. Patrons can choose up to three VHS tapes and DVDs to rent, totally free of charge. Late fees still apply, though! You can keep the goods for five days before your credit card, which they take a record of just in case, begins to incur charges.
Alamo Drafthouse is itself worth a visit if you’re a movie buff. There’s a second NYC location in Downtown Brooklyn and both are excellent. They’ve got a phenomenal full menu for meals during their showings, sometimes themed to the movie, and their halls are decorated with cool memorabilia and photo-ops. Plus, they have a strict no-phone-use policy during a movie, which you’ve got to love.
It’s remarkable that people care enough to keep the legacy of Kim’s alive and well, and to ensure public access to the treasure trove of world cinema. Seeing the new iteration of the store in person gave me a new understanding of what Redmon and his co-director Ashley Sabin were getting at with their documentary. Kim’s Video affected everyone who walked through its doors, and this is but one small story in the larger tapestry of its impact on film nerds. It’s a testament to small businesses, the beauty of the motion pictures, and the greatest city in the world.
TV and City 