by Erin Free
Worth: $18.50
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
David Redmon, Yongman Kim, Sean Price Williams, Alex Ross Perry
Intro:
An absolute must for film fans.
There’s been something of a proliferation lately of films abut cinemas, movie fans, and video stores (many of them on oddball free streamer Tubi…check out the excellent likes of Out Of Print and The Last Blockbuster), but make no mistake, the new doco Kim’s Video is something decidedly different. The story of a beloved indie video store chain that dominated New York City in the 1980s and 1990s, Kim’s Video begins as a hip walk down memory lane from director David Redmon, who admittedly instantly announces himself as a far-from-typical nostalgia merchant, and something more akin to a tortured obsessive, indicating that his film will soon take an unusual turn.
And turn it does. Aided by manifest film references and movie clips that speak alongside his own inner monologue, stream-of-consciousness-style narration, Redmon lays out the initial story of Kim’s Video, a chain of video stores established by Yongman Kim, a Korean immigrant dry cleaning entrepreneur with a serious bent for film. A wannabe filmmaker himself (he directed the 2006 oddity One-Third), Kim stacked his shelves with thousands of international, indie and experimental films (many of them bootlegged, mind you), and quickly made his name as an essential player on New York’s film scene. After too many busts and other problems, however, Kim opts to close down his business and curiously offers up his huge collection of historically significant VHS tapes and DVDs as a cultural donation to any organisations willing to tender for it. Bizarrely, the winning tender comes from the small town of Salemi in Italy…and from there, things get very, very weird.
Curiously claiming that he can hear the voices of the VHS tapes and DVDs talking to him, one-time Kim’s Video member David Redmon embarks on a journey to find them and liberate them, which takes him down a variety of very strange rabbit holes, as he travels to rural Italy and gets tripped up in the entangled webs of the local political and legal systems. The less said the better about where things go from there, as every new twist and turn, and every newly introduced figure, play like odd plot points in a weird, incredibly compelling thriller. At the centre of it all is the very peculiar Yongman Kim, whose obtuse air of mystery is matched by director David Redmon’s very odd brand of energy. A wonderful walk on the wild side of cinema, Kim’s Video is a true delight: it’s funny, weird, shocking, strikingly well-structured, occasionally surreal, and incredibly compelling. An absolute must for film fans.
Revelation Perth International Film Festival runs from July 3-14. For all session, venue and ticketing details for Kim’s Video, click here.
