A wild journey investigating what happened to a NYC video store archive that blends film essay, non-fiction, & other genres. We break down experimental doc KIM’S VIDEO by David Redmon and Ashley Sabin while reflecting on collective memory and the ethics of bootlegging vs. the film knowledge of a well-curated archive.
Sundance 2023 Section: NEXT
Distribution: Not online
From Sundance’s website: For two decades, New York City cinephiles had access to a treasure trove of rare and esoteric films through 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 provided that it stay intact and be available to Kim’s Video members. In a bid to revitalize tourism, the small Italian village of Salemi, Sicily became home to the archive. But after the initial publicity faded, so too did any sign of the collection. Enter filmmaker David Redmon, who credits Kim’s Video for his film education. With the ghosts of cinema past leading his way, Redmon embarks on a seemingly quixotic quest to track down what happened to the legendary collection and to free it from purgatory.
David Redmon and Ashley Sabin’s playful documentary embraces various filmic forms, from cine-essay and investigative nonfiction to experimental cinema and even heist movies, to fashion an ode to the love of cinema and the enduring power its stories hold.
Music Credit: spacedust by airtone
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:13.501] Kent Bye: Hello, my name is Kent Bye. And I'm Wonder Bright. And welcome to Story All The Way Down. We're continuing on on our podcast series of Sundance 2023. Today, we're going to be covering a next documentary from Sundance called Kim's Video by David Redman and Ashley Sabin. And this was one hell of a ride. I really, really enjoyed this film. I should say up top that this is the type of film that I would recommend people just go and watch and to be taking on the adventure, but I will read a little bit of the synopsis just to give you a bit of the flavor of what's covered here. So for two decades, New York City cinephiles had access to a treasure trove of rare and esoteric films through Kim's Video. Originally run by the enigmatic youngman 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, provided that it stay intact and be available to Kim's Video members. That's probably a good place to stop for the description because it ends up being a fusion of what they describe in the synopsis. It embraces different filmic forms from cine-essay to investigative nonfiction to experimental cinema and even heist movies. There's a fusion of different genres and forms as the filmmakers themselves, both David Redman and Ashley Sabin, take us on this wild ride. So I really quite enjoyed this film. And yeah, I'd love to hear some of your initial thoughts on it.
[00:01:45.337] Wonder Bright: Well, I mean, it's just fun. It's really, really fun. And if you're somebody who loves movies, and especially if you remember going to video stores and having an independent video store in a city, Then this is a film you really kind of have to watch because, you know, I lived in Los Angeles in the 90s and early aughts. So for me it was Jerry's Videos and Video Journey and I think it's Vidiot if I was down in Santa Monica. And so this is the New York, not equivalent, something much, much bigger as you come to find out as you're watching this story. But it is just a good old fashioned yarn, well told with many a twist and a turn that you can't see coming. And it would not only spoil the film for you to tell you, but it would you know, not dissimilar to what we just described about the tube of thieves. It ends up becoming an adventure film when it really just sets out with a simple documentary quest, which is what happened to Kim's video. And it starts out simply enough with an unassuming, youngish protagonist. The film centers on David Redman. You don't really realize that there's a secondary filmmaker unless you've read it until two thirds of the way through, because they've focused on Redman's experience. And so it starts with his story and like how he got into film and what it meant to him and his moving to New York and how he found Kim's video. Like why it was so meaningful for him and how he could see all these films that you couldn't see anywhere else and they're like bootlegged copies and they're like experimental and they're Classics and they're this and they're that but mostly they're bootlegged and so the film starts off with this like a whole kind of rickety premise where I'm not sure that he's a reliable character and and You know, I'm again, not somebody who really necessarily enjoys experimental films. I wasn't going to the independent film stores because I was renting the experimental ones. I was getting the classics. But this guy probably got everything. And so I wasn't 100% sure what was happening, but that kind of destabilization ended up being essential to the narrative as it unfolded because it's just one surprise after another. And these two really push the envelope both in reality and in the way that they craft the story so that you end up feeling A wee bit destabilized as a viewer, but mostly you're just completely sympathizing with David as he's on this journey to find out what happened to this amazing collection that he spent his youth absorbing. And what happened to the man behind the collection, Kim himself? Where is he? Does he know what happened to his collection? So, you know, it's a real testament to what can unfold when you have a singular question, like a single provocation, and you just don't give up. You just follow it doggedly. you know, I don't know if that's actually what was happening or how much David and Ashley were self-aware. The way that they've told the story, it feels like you are just pell-mell, fully like, okay, finally, I'm in. Yes, I too need to know what happened to the collection. Where is Kim? What's going on?
[00:05:41.843] Kent Bye: Yeah. There's this blending of the fiction and nonfiction to a point where it does, at some points, become a little bit difficult to know what's real or what's not real. But I took it as to be mostly nonfiction in the sense that I trusted that the story that they had recounted was actually what had happened. But I wanted to mention a few things from my own experience in moving to Baltimore. There was Video Americaine where they had all these selections of documentaries that just weren't available where I grew up in Indiana. And so it was like my film education in a lot of ways of really getting to see a lot of these documentary classics that just immersed into these worlds and stories from many generations of the past. There's this moment where they're kind of reckoning that Mr. Kim in Kim's video is bootlegging these films. There's this tension between the copyrights of these individual creators versus what they say is this more utilitarian argument in the sense that there's cinematic knowledge that's contained in these films that needs to be made available as a repository to this community. And so that's what it ended up being. And my understanding at least is that Mr. Kim was a filmmaker himself and would make films and realize that in the process of making films that, we talked about this in our very first episode, in the sense that Sometimes you make something, but it doesn't have wider distribution. He was trying to solve this deeper distribution problem, even though there wasn't necessarily a fully ethical business model around it in the sense that their bootleg had a larger purpose of trying to distribute the stories and the knowledge of cinematic filmmaking. to the community there in New York City. And it's clear the impact that this had on the protagonist narrator that we're following, who's a co-director with Ashley Sabin, who's making this as a story. But I wanted to just point out this film essay part where there's a clipping of fair use of film that he's referencing. And so he's drawing these analogies between what's happening in his physical life, but also what has happened in the cinematic life and the way that those cinematic and the physical lives blend together and are woven together and referenced throughout the course of the film, I thought was just really quite masterful to pull in all these different references and to kind of make jokes around different moments and Yeah, I really appreciated that element of it as well because you get a whole other layer of how he's referencing this cultural context that he is himself embedded in and paying homage to. And yeah, so it's a film about cult videos and it's a cult video within itself. And so that was one of the tweets that I saw making sense of this film. It's about cult movies, but it becomes kind of a cult movie within its own right.
[00:08:32.680] Wonder Bright: I'm so glad you brought that up about how they embedded all of these clips from classic films across the decades to tell the story as it's unfolding. You know, he's like this character in this film in this moment, and then he's like this other character in this film in this moment. what does he do when he's at a crossroads just like this character in this film at this moment? And oh my gosh. And it really conveys this depth of love and longing for film and story that is just so rich, but also just deeply comic and doesn't ever take itself too seriously, despite how serious some of these films are. I mean, you know, Rosebud, anyone? That I think I really appreciate it about. It's like a serious passion tale, but it doesn't take itself seriously.
[00:09:34.122] Kent Bye: Yeah, one of the other aspects of this film is that some of the bootlegged or other undistributed at a broader scale films were really capturing the history of New York as well. And so you had some of these films were shot in different neighborhoods of New York City and how the city itself had changed. And there was this quote that I actually transcribed and have here and I want to just read it because I think it's a really good encapsulation to some of the really pithy, deep insights that this film has. So at one point, Redmond narrates and he says, cinema is a record of existence. It contains traces of lives lived, of phantoms, ghosts, and when it's thoughtfully organized as an archive, it's our collective memory of the living dead. So it's this idea that when you have an archive like this, it becomes this sense of our collective memory. And so it's not just these films, but it's also our memories and our collective memories. Yeah, there's just a number of moments like that that just really hit me as he's reflecting on what is really driving him to go through all this circuitous journey to where he's ending up, but kind of reflecting along the way. So yeah, love to hear any other reflections on that poetic flourish that he had in this idea of cinema as a record of existence, containing those traces of lives lived and phantoms and ghosts.
[00:10:59.229] Wonder Bright: Well, another way the filmmakers gave us access to that was by showing footage of New York in the era that Redmond is referencing and in the era that Kim's video first appears on the scene and when it was in its heyday. And if you remember going to a video store for a VHS copy, you will also remember talking to the clerks in that video store. And some of them had been working there for two decades, if you were going there in the aughts. And the kind of collective lore that they had contained amongst themselves and the opinions that they would have and the arguments you could get into. And also just the way that the city looks. You know, for me, it might have been Los Angeles or Totnes, England. I'm now thinking about a video store that I used to go to back in the 90s there. But if you think about these locations, it's a snapshot in time because we don't even have VHS anymore. We don't have video stores. It doesn't exist. So you're getting street scenes and visuals that are gone, but embedded in this cinematic memory and certainly embedded in this film.
[00:12:26.217] Kent Bye: Yeah, there's a trope that he had, which is the ghosts of cinema past is what he called these luminaries, these filmmakers who had created this whole archive of different films and how they're in some ways the ancestors to this lineage of filmmaking as a craft and ways that he's bringing those characters to life through either referencing their films or kind of embodying these characters with these masks in a way that is both in the film, but also in the marketing of the film. If you see any photos of the screen filled with people watching, and they're all kind of wearing these oversized black and white masks of these different filmmaking luminaries from across time, the ghosts of cinema past. And so, Yeah, it's a really, really fun film and I hope it gets distribution. It's kind of ironic in the sense that Kim's video was all about these bootleg videos and getting them out there. I don't know how marketable a film like this is going to be, but I certainly thought it was quite an adventure. It felt like a love letter to films in a way that was also honoring it from the story he's telling, but also just how he's embodying it in all the different structures and forms of how he's even crafting this piece, blending the different genres together in a way that kind of really lives into the category of the Sundance Next, which is the pure bold works distinguished by an innovative forward-thinking approach to storytelling. Digital technology paired with unfettered creativity promises that the films in this section will shape a greater next wave in American cinema. So yeah, I really feel like that this is a strong, bold fusion of all these different genres and yeah, just a story that's really well told and just quite enjoyable. So what are you bearing witness to in this film?
[00:14:15.333] Wonder Bright: I want to bear witness to what happens when you, on the surface of it, ask a really simple, straightforward question. And the absolute many-splendored thing that can erupt if you just stay focused and really curious. And I also just want to bear witness to two filmmakers who obviously care about story as much as anybody possibly could. And the way in which they have crafted a story that tells a story of stories in a really effective, dynamic and deeply funny way.
[00:15:00.491] Kent Bye: Yeah. And I want to bear witness to the surprise, all the surprises that I had in this film, because I really didn't know where it was going to be going next. And just by the end of it, I will also say that there's some moments of reading the credits than the film that you get some extra payoff of the different characters that he meets along the way and how they end up co-creating the story in a way that you feel like he's wandering through the desert, but yet he's getting enough of a glimmer to keep the story going. And I'm sure there's a lot of dead ends that didn't make the final cut, but at least the way that the story is crafted, it just really flows into one logical next step to the next. And then you progressively, by the end of it, you kind of feel like you've climbed a mountain and you're like, wow, that was quite a journey. So yeah, quite enjoyable, highly recommend it. And this reflection of the cinema as a record of existence and a collection like this is thoughtfully organized as an archive. And it serves as a collective memory of the living dead and Yeah, I just like that idea and a part of cultural heritage that we can draw inspiration from. And there's this connection to the past and connection to ancestors in this film that I really want to just honor as well.
[00:16:16.957] Wonder Bright: Even if they're only like 30 years old. Yeah. Yeah, it's a wonderful film.
[00:16:27.188] Kent Bye: So that was Kim's video. It was by David Redman and Ashley Sabin. It was part of the next category. At this point, it doesn't have distribution as far as I can tell. And yeah, if you'd like to support the Story All the Way Down podcast, then you can go to storyallthewaydown.com and find out more information for how to support our project here.
