Kim’s Video was a grungy movie rental empire and cinephile paradise in downtown Manhattan that grouped its tapes and DVDs by director. Started in 1987 out of a dry-cleaning business by Yongman Kim, who was a little-seen and mysterious figure to even his employees, Kim’s Video eventually expanded to five stores and became a way of life for both the customers and the people who worked there.
(I worked at the Kim’s farthest west on Bleecker Street one summer and we all gorged ourselves on movie classics, cult films, outsider art, bootlegs of rarities, and shelves and shelves of unclassifiable ephemera.)
Video stores started to close by 2008 when the near-mythical Mr. Kim offered his collection of 55,000 movies to any institution that would keep it intact. The town of Salemi, Sicily, acquired the archive, and in 2012 there was an article in The Village Voice by Karina Longworth that attempted to figure out what had happened to it, but the final fate of the collection is at last revealed in “Kim’s Video,” a documentary by director David Redmon and his filmmaking partner Ashley Sabin that plays like an expert comic thriller.
Redmon became obsessed with finding out what had happened to Mr. Kim’s collection in 2017, and he started talking to former Kim’s clerks like filmmaker Alex Ross Perry and cinematographer Sean Price Williams. The FBI used to regularly raid Kim’s because of their bootlegs, particularly of impossible-to-see early Warhol films, but Redmon is told that Mr. Kim would replenish his raided stock of world cinema with videotapes that sometimes came directly from embassies.
Redmon travels to Salemi and is told that he cannot view the archive, but he pushes open a door on the third floor of a building where the films are housed and sees that they are poorly stored: tapes of movies by Samuel Fuller and George Kuchar and obscure old pornography tapes are stacked around haphazardly, and water has gotten onto some of them. An alarm goes off and Redmon is told to leave by an amiable chief of police who begins to comically and likably preen for the camera, as if he is enjoying playing a role in a movie.
“Kim’s Video” feels like a 1960s Italian comedy in these first scenes in Sicily, and this comic feel is sustained when we see footage of the archive being unloaded at a ceremony in Salemi in 2009. (“A porn movie!” cries an enthusiastic onlooker at the event as the tapes are unloaded.) But the tone darkens considerably once Redmon encounters some officials higher up in the political food chain, like the shady Vittorio Sgarbi, who is famed in Italy as an art historian and public intellectual.
Sgarbi was instrumental in bringing the Kim’s archive to Salemi, but when Redmon tries to engage with Sgarbi at public events it is clear he has reasons for not wishing to discuss the collection. The plot thickens when Redmon contacts Mr. Kim himself. Tall and movie-star handsome, the commanding Mr. Kim tries to warn Redmon about the people he is dealing with in Salemi: “It’s like a movie scene of Scorsese,” he says. But Redmon will not be put off, even when he goes back to Salemi and interviews an official named Leopoldo Falco who dies just as he is investigating mafia ties in Salemi.
The ending of “Kim’s Video” is so audacious and improbable that it feels like it must be somehow fictional, but if Redmon did even half of what he claims to have done then he deserves some sort of medal for near-foolhardy perseverance. Even Mr. Kim is finally impressed by Redmon’s adventurousness and flair for the dramatic: “Unbelievable!” he keeps saying, as Redmon tells him the lengths he has gone to in order to steal the collection back.
“Kim’s Video” is so delightful because Redmon and Sabin have taken a subject that might have led to wistful dead ends and follow it through to such an extent that they wound up with a gold mine of material and a documentary that plays like a bold narrative feature.
The world and aesthetic of Kim’s Video will always live on in the memory of those who experienced it, and this movie memorializes that world while also freeing it to live again as a kind of funny zombie version of itself, and there could be nothing more true to the spirit of Kim’s than that.
“Kim’s Video” makes its world premiere at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. The film is executive produced by Fremantle.