“I want the collection to have a voice because it made me find mine.”…
Calling all Cinephiles!!!
This week the ‘Fantastic Fest’ movie festival brought us some phenomenal documentaries. True stories that I had no idea about. The one that stands out the most in my mind is absolutely ‘Kim’s Video.’ If ever there was a documentary designed for the movie-addicted amongst us, this is undoubtedly it.
Without giving too much away, the story chronicles arguably the World’s largest VHS videotape collections housed in lower Manhattan, New York in the 80s and what happens to this enormous library of 55,000 tapes when the owner (Youngman Kim, a Korean businessman) decides to sell.
The documentary has a runtime of 1 hour 25 minutes, during which writers David Redmon, Ashley Sabin and Matthew Doughtery take us through a range of emotions. Deep fascination, immense intrigue to understand more, a wildly unforeseeable twist, and this all culminates in profuse eagerness to tell as many people as I can to watch this documentary.
Some provocatively unique questions are asked in the film:
Is film knowledge more important than film ownership?
Did Kim sell the VHS tapes intentionally or negligently?
Does Kim have a case for criminal or civil proceedings against the buyer for contractual repudiation?
The documentary does an astounding job of laying out the facts of the true story so that the audience knows the truth about the buyer’s actions post-purchase.
An absolute must-watch, ‘Kim’s Video’ is full of surprises and was featured at Sundance and Tribeca film festivals with great success.