Filmmaker David Redmon along with Ashley Sabin set out to find the legendary lost video collection of 55,000 movies from the iconic New York City video store named Kim’s Video.
Originally run by the enigmatic Yongman Kim out of his dry-cleaning business, his franchise eventually amassed 55,000 rental titles. In 2008, facing a changing industry, Mr. Kim offered to give away his collection away and Salemi, Sicily became home to the archive. But after the initial publicity faded, so too did any sign of the collection.
Release Date
Directed by Ashley Sabin and David Redmon, Kim’s Video world premiered at Sundance Film Festival and opens theatrically in NYC and LA on April 5th, then expands throughout the US and Canada starting April 12th.
Synopsis
Physical media reigns supreme in Kim’s Video, an elegiac tribute to the iconic video store in New York City that inspired a generation of cinephiles before it mysteriously closed its doors and sent its legendary film archive to a small and slightly dubious Sicilian village for “safekeeping.” But what starts as an homage to cinema quickly becomes a rescue mission to ensure the eternal preservation of the beloved video collection.
Reviews
In their fantastic review, Variety described the film as ‘an off-the-wall documentary thriller about the fate of the Kim’s collection’ writing, “But what became of the Kim’s collection?”
“That, as it turns out, is the real subject of “Kim’s Video,” a film-geek reverie that winds up diving down a rabbit hole of underground intrigue. The movie fashions itself a kind of documentary thriller, and the suspense begins by plumbing the mystery of the man who owned Kim’s. His name is Youngman Kim, and he’s a tall, burly, corporate-cool South Korean immigrant of few words who was 21 when he arrived in New York City in 1979. He started a dry-cleaning business and had an idea to place random copies of VHS tapes on a shelf for people to rent. It turned out that the video rentals were more successful than the dry-cleaning. So he opened the first Kim’s Video.”
Official Trailer
Watch the official trailer for Kim’s Video