Alex Ross Perry Archives

Review: ‘Videoheaven,’ a comprehensive documentary about the earliest decades of video stores and the home video revolution

June 6, 2025

by Carla Hay

A scene from “Videoheaven” (Photo courtesy of Cinema Conservancy)

Directed by Alex Ross Perry

Culture Representation: The documentary film “Videoheaven” is an archival documentary about how home videos and video stores changed pop culture from the 1970s to the 2010s.

Culture Clash: The home video revolution created a business boom for video stores from the 1980s to the 2000s, until the rise of streaming services and other digital distribution made video stores obsolete.

Culture Audience: “Videoheaven” will appeal primarily to pop culture enthusiasts who want to see a deep-dive look at how the home video business, especially video stores, affected movies and television.

Depending on your perspective, “Videoheaven” can be enjoyable or an endurance test. This three-hour documentary (about how video stores changed pop culture) is a history presentation that’s better as a three-episode series instead of a feature-length film. Maya Hawke gives delightful narration. “Videoheaven” had its world premiere at the 2025 International Film Festival Rotterdam and its North American premiere at the 2025 Tribeca Festival.

Written and directed by Alex Ross Perry, “Videoheaven” will have the most appeal to people who avidly collect movies and TV shows to watch at home. These are pop culture enthusiasts who don’t want to wait until they casually stumble upon something to watch. They actively seek out their preferred movies and TV shows and want to own the movies and TV shows they like the most.

“Videoheaven” also has a huge nostalgia factor for viewers who know what it’s like to spend countless hours in a video store—or at least remember when brick-and-mortar video stores were as common as grocery stores. A cinema screen is still considered the most ideal way to watch a movie, but home videos allowed watching of movies and TV shows to be more accessible and more convenient than ever before. And for kids who aren’t old enough to see certain movies, home videos have been a gateway to that access.

“Videoheaven” is told in six chapters, with an epilogue. Except for Hawke’s narration that was written specifically for “Videoheaven,” the documentary consists entirely of archival clips. No one is interviewed for the documentary, which is a wise choice because the clips and the narration already provide a wealth of details. However, “Videoheaven” really did not need to be three hours long. The movie could have used tighter editing by making the same points with fewer clips as examples.

The first chapter of “Videoheaven” gives an overview of the invention of the videocassette recorder (VCR) and how VCRs transitioned in the 1970s from being electronic equipment used only in professional environments to being a luxury item that people could use in their homes. By the early 1980s, VCRs became smaller and more affordable for home use—much like computers evolved in the marketplace to become common household items by the 1980s.

As VCR sales began to rise, the entertainment industry jumped on this popularity by releasing movies and TV shows on videocassettes. To this day, home video sales and rentals are still dominated by movies and TV shows. The Beta tape format was eventually overtaken by VHS. DVDs get a brief mention toward the end of the documentary, which focuses mostly on the decades when videocassettes were the main format to rent and sell movies and TV shows.

The 1980s was the first decade of the video store boom, which gets considerable exploration in the documentary. The majority of “Videoheaven” is a deep-dive look at how video stores have been depicted in scripted movies and scripted TV shows from the 1980s to the 2010s. “Videoheaven” doesn’t just include the obvious mainstream choices but also gives considerable screen time to obscure independent films that prominently feature video stores. Two of these obscure movies mentioned include 1984’s “Disconnected” and 1987’s “Video Violence.” Troma Entertainment movies (known for their low-budget kitsch), which people often discovered first on home video, get frequent mentions in “Videoheaven.”

“Videoheaven” points out that in the early-to-mid 1980s, films such as “Videodrome” (1983) and “Body Double” (1984) often depicted video stores and video watching as alluring but potentially dangerous. By the late 1980s, video stores had become so common, they were usually depicted as community-oriented independent stores or high-tech and flashy corporate retailers. Blockbuster Video is the obvious template for many video stores that fit the corporate-owned description.

Perhaps the most amusing part of the documentary is in showing how pornography impacted the home video business because of porn’s popularity on home video. The “adults only” sections of video stores (which were not allowed at corporate-owned stores but thrived in independently owned stores) were often used as fodder for jokes in numerous movies and TV shows. Another frequently used joke was having people being caught buying, renting or browsing porn videos in video stores. (Clips from the 2004 movie “Jersey Girl” and TV shows “Seinfeld,” “Friends” and “Beverly Hills, 90210” are used as some examples of porn embarrassments in video stores.)

Video stores weren’t always used as the source of mockery on screen. There’s a very good analysis of what the video store represents in the 2007 zombie apocalypse film “I Am Legend,” which was adapted from Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel of the same name. “Videoheaven” points out that if “I Am Legend” took place during a time when video stores were obsolete, then that video scene would not have existed in “I Am Legend.”

What “Videoheaven” conveys very well through its meticulous assembling of clips and thoughtful narration is the significance that video stores (in their heyday) were many things to many people. Video stores could be emporiums of overwhelming entertainment choices, community gathering places, pickup joints, informal schools of pop culture, or places where kids could get access to movies they were too young to see in theaters—just to name some of the ways that people could perceive or use video stores.

And sometimes in action flicks or horror films, video stores were places for some brutal fights and showdowns. “Videoheaven” names many examples, including 1987’s “The Lost Boys,” 1988’s “Remote Control,” 1989’s “The Dead Next Door,” 1989’s “The Toxic Avenger Part III: The Last Temptation of Toxie,” and 1998’s “The Big Hit.” And in 1993’s “The Last Action Hero,” Arnold Schwarzenegger (as the action movie star Jack Slater) poked fun at himself when Jack and his kid sidekick Danny Madigan (played by Austin O’Brien) go into a Blockbuster-type video store and see a display of Sylvester Stallone as the star of “Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” which in real life had Schwarzenegger as the star.

The video store clerk also became a common character in movies and TV and was often stereotyped as (1) a nerdy cinephile, who could be very judgmental about customers’ choices or (2) a rude, lazy or unhelpful employee. “Videoheaven” mentions Dawson Leery of the 1998-2003 TV drama series “Dawson’s Creek” as one of the few on-screen depictions of a video store clerk as being conisistently polite and not neurotic.

Hawke gives the narration a lively and engaging tone that is more like a conversation than an academic lecture—even though much of the script is written as pop culture history lessons, with some opinions sprinkled in here and there. Hawke portrayed video store clerk Robin Buckley in the Netflix horror series “Stranger Things” (which takes place in the 1980s), so it’s inevitable that “Videoheaven” has a few “Stranger Things” clips of Robin Buckley and her video store co-worker Steve Harrington (played by Joe Keery) on the job at Family Video, the fictional video store in “Stranger Things.”

“Videoheaven” references several movies where owners or employees of video stores are the protagonists, including 1994’s “Clerks,” 2007’s “Watching the Detectives,” 2008’s “Be Kind Rewind” and 2008’s “Good Dick.” It’s noted that by the time “Be Kind Rewind” and “Good Dick” were released, video stores were a dying business. In the case of “Be Kind Rewind,” the screenplay was written long before the decline of video stores.

Before he became a filmmaker, Perry was a video store clerk at Kim’s Video, a retail chain of video stores in New York City. (The documentary “Kim’s Video,” released in 2024, captures a similar nostalgic sentiment toward the bygone era of brick-and-mortar video stores. Perry is one of the people interviewed in “Kim’s Video.”) There was obviously a lot of passion and care that went into the research, clip compilations and narration script for “Videoheaven.” The movie’s three-hour run time will be too exhausting for some viewers. But for viewers who want to soak up a lot of on-screen history about video stores, “Videoheaven” is an immersive ride worth taking.

Cinema Conservancy will release “Videoheaven” in New York City on July 2, 2025, and in Los Angeles on August 6, 2025, with an expansion to other cities on various other dates.

Review: ‘Kim’s Video,’ starring Yongman Kim, David Redmon, Domenico Venuti, Leopoldo Falco, Alex Ross Perry, Dennis Dermody and David Muraca

June 3, 2023

by Carla Hay

“Kim’s Video”

Directed by David Redmon and Ashley Sabin

Some language in Italian with subtitles

Culture Representation: Taking place in the United States, Italy, and South Korea, the documentary “Kim’s Video” features a predominantly white group of people (with a few Asians and African Americans) discussing the legacy and noteworthy inventory of Kim’s Video & Music, a New York City-based retail company that operated from 1995 to 2014, and was known for having thousands of obscure and rare movies.

Culture Clash: “Kim’s Video” co-director Davd Redmon goes on investigative journey to find out what happened to the store’s approximately 55,000 videos that Kim’s Video founder Yongman Kim donated to the small Italian city of Salemi, Sicily, in 2009.

Culture Audience: “Kim’s Video” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in “treasure hunt” type of documentaries and documentaries about the history of video stores.

A photo still from “Kim’s Video” (Photo by Ashley Sabin and David Redmon)

“Kim’s Video” is a love letter to not just one video store but also a bygone era when people gathered at actual video stores to rent and buy movies and TV shows. This documentary’s “gonzo” style sometimes looks staged, but the movie is mostly entertaining. “Kim’s Video” had its world premiere at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival and has since made the rounds at other film festivals in 2023, including the Beijing International Film Festival, the Copenhagen Documentary Film Festival and the Tribeca Festival.

Directed by David Redmon and Ashley Sabin, “Kim’s Video” features Redmon as one of the “stars” of the movie. He can be heard on camera as the narrator and interviewer, but he is almost never seen on camera. Most of “Kim’s Video” is about the hunt to find out what happened to the approximately 55,000 videos that used to be inventory for the New York City-based retail company Kim’s Video & Music (more commonly known as Kim’s Video), whose specialty was selling and renting obscure and rare movies.

“Kim’s Video” begins with Redmon giving a brief summary of his personal history. He says he became “obsessed” with movies from a very early age during his childhood in rural Texas. He explains that his parents were only 17 when he was born, and they sent him to live with his grandmother when he was 6 years old. His grandmother let him watch a lot of movies, which inspired his desire to become a filmmaker.

Redmon says he became so obsessed with movies and filmmaking, “Sometimes I found it difficult to distinguish between fiction and reality.” As an example, he mentions that after seeing director Richard Linklater’s 1990 mumblecore comedy/drama film “Slacker” (which was filmed in Austin, Texas), Redmon drove to Austin and tried to look for the characters in “Slacker,” because he thought they were real people.

He also says that where he lived in Texas (he does not name the city) did not have a video store and the closest that someone could go to be around movies was the local Wal-Mart. He got a job there but got fired after the manager accused him of stealing movies and putting them a dumpster. Redmon moved to New York City and discovered Kim’s Video. “I knew immediately that I found a new home,” Redmon says of this retail business.

Before the documentary gets to the “treasure hunt” part of the story, there’s a fairly long stretch of interviews with former Kim’s Video employees, most of whom were store clerks or store managers. Many of these ex-Kim’s Video employees went on to work in the movie industry in some capacity, including filmmaker Alex Ross Perry, comedian David Wain and journalists Dennis Dermody and Lorry Kitka. All of them have nothing but praise for Kim’s Video, which had a chain of about seven stores in New York City, until all but one named Mondo Kim’s remained open. The other store locations all had the word “Kim’s” in the title, such as Kim’s Underground, Kim’s Mediapolis and Kim’s West.

Dermody describes the selections of bootlegs and obscure releases at Kim’s Video: “It was a treasure trove.” Wain remembers what he felt like when he walked into the store: “I’m stepping into the gold mine of cool.” Anna Thorngate, a former Kim’s Video employee, comments on what made Kim’s Video so special: “It was just this weird little headquarters of watching and thinking about movies. It was the place to get weird movies.” Kitka says that Kim’s Video customers Joel Coen and Ethan Coen—two brothers who would go on to become Oscar-winning filmmakers—had $600 in late fees by the time the last Kim’s Video store shut down.

Although many of the employees paint a rosy picture of Kim’s Video, the company had a shady history of trafficking a lot of bootleg videos, and the company would regularly get fined and raided by the FBI. It’s mentioned in the documentary that Kim would get many of these bootlegs by requesting movies from the U.S. Embassy, making copies of the tapes, and selling those copies. Former Kim’s video employee Ryan Krivoshey says that every time a Kim’s Video store got busted for bootlegs, owner Kim would just replenish the bootleg supply even more.

However, all this bootlegging eventually caught up to Kim’s Video. It’s the main reason why the company shut down having multiple locations and was only left with one, until that final one closed too. Robert Greene, a former Kim’s Video employee, recalls fondly: “We were really proud of those tapes … We felt we were above the law. The law said, ‘Ownership matters.’ We said, ‘Film knowledge matters more.'” Other former Kim’s Video employees interviewed in the documentary include Isabell Gillies, Eric Hynes and Sean Price Williams.

There’s a significant part of the documentary that’s about trying to track down Yongman Kim, the mysterious South Korean entrepreneur who founded Kim’s Video. The company was fully operational from 1995 to 2009, and the very last Kim’s Video retail location officially closed in 2014. The documentary mentions that not much is known about Kim outside of his video business. He served in the Korean military; immigrated to the U.S. in 1979, when he was 21; and he started a laundry business before going into the video retail business. In his youth, Kim went to film school and later also dabbled in filmmaking.

In 2008, Kim did something very unexpected: He announced that the Kim’s Video flagship New York City store Mondo Kim’s would be closing the following year and that he was donating the company’s inventory of about 55,000 movies to the Italian city of Salemi, located in Sicily. Why was Salemi chosen? The city promised to take proper care of the videos, give free rentals to customers, and offer sleeping quarters to people who were in the Kim’s Video membership program.

Salemi hired Glen Hyman, a Kim’s Video customer, to write the proposal to Kim’s Video. In the documentary, Hyman admits he had no idea what he was doing at the time when he got involved in this business deal. Filmmaker/ex-Kim’s video employee Perry says he’s still amazed that this relatively obscure city was chosen instead of a more well-known place. “What on earth was anyone thinking that this [donating the inventory to Salemi] made more sense than NYU [New York University] saying, ‘We’ll take it’?”

And so, off Redmon goes to Salemi (in 2017), in search of these lost movies, which are mostly in the formats of cassette tapes and DVDs. It turns out that finding the inventory in Salemi wasn’t as easy as some people thought it might be. Instead of the video store being a tourist attraction, as originally intended, Redmon shows in the documentary that, in 2017, the videos were stored in a place shrouded in mystery and kept off-limits to the public.

“Kim’s Video” takes a sometimes comical tone when Redmon confronts certain people and demands access to the videos, because he says he’s still a card-carrying member of Kim’s Video. And then, the movie takes a dark turn when it exposes the Mafia connection to this bizarre story. It’s a tale of greed and politics. Leopoldo Falco, who was president of Italy’s Anti-Mafia Investigative Commission, gives one of the most memorable interviews in the film. Redmon also gets help from an Italian journalist named Marco Bora.

During the course of the documentary, Redmon has various run-ins with Salemi police chief Diego Muraca, as well people whose job is to guard the place where the long-lost Kim’s Video movies were kept in Salemi. There’s also some amusing footage of Redmon trying to get an interview with then-Salemi mayor Domenico Venuti. It should come as no surprise that Redmon had to stalk Venuti in public places in attempts to get this interview. At one point, Redmon becomes well-known enough to Venuti’s entourage that Venuti is shown on camera actively avoiding Redmon whenever he sees Redmon.

The second half of the documentary is better than the first half, which wastes a little too much time with repetitive gushing about Kim’s Video from ex-employees. One of the other problems that some people might have with the “Kim’s Video” documentary is that it’s difficult to know how much of an act Redmon is putting on for the camera when he does this type of ambush documentary filmmaking. There’s a break-in scene that looks like it could have been staged and possibly scripted.

Is “Kim’s Video” co-director Redmon a dedicated Kim’s Video fan, or is he a fanatic who’s gone too far? “Kim’s Video” invites viewers to make up their own minds. At the very least, the movie gives answers that a lot of Kim’s Video enthusiasts might have about what really happened to Kim’s Video founder Kim and all the videos that he donated. People who follow the news about a certain Austin-based company with various locations might already know where those videos are now. But the “Kim’s Video” documentary is a mostly entertaining chronicle of the quest to find out answers to a lot of Kim’s Video questions, although cinephiles who are fans of obscure movies are most likely to appreciate this documentary.

UPDATE: Drafthouse Films will release “Kim’s Video” in select U.S. cinemas on April 5, 2024, with an expansion to more U.S. cinemas on April 12, 2024.