At NHDocs, An Old Video Store Becomes A Mafia-Entangled Mystery

Graphics and animation by Carla Costanza.

In early 2009, a large yellow shipping container arrived in the small Sicilian town of Salemi to much fanfare. Residents chanted “Sa-le-mi, Sa-le-mi!” as their mayor, the art critic and politician Vittorio Sgarbi, swung open the container’s doors. Inside, packed into dozens upon dozens of cardboard boxes, were 55,000 VHS tapes.

 The collection of tapes had been donated to the town by the Korean-American businessman, actor, and cinephile Yongman Kim. After moving to New York in 1979, Kim opened a video rental store in the East Village called Kim’s Video. Over the course of the next couple decades, Kim’s Video grew in popularity—eventually expanding to six other locations around the city—and became a vibrant countercultural hub with an almost cultish following.

The store was particularly renowned for its selections of obscure, foreign, and disreputable films, many of which were bootlegged. The FBI repeatedly raided the store to confiscate the illegal reproductions, but Kim’s would simply replace the contraband within weeks.

With the rise of online video rental and streaming services in the first decade of the 2000s, however, Kim was slowly forced to shutter his stores. For reasons not entirely clear, he chose to donate his cache of films to Salemi—though it seems like the mafia may have been involved, according to several of the people who have since chronicled the story.

The bizarre story of how an iconic, eclectic New York video store’s collection ended up in Sicily is the topic of David Redmon and Ashley Sabin’s new feature-length documentary Kim’s Video, which screened at the New Haven Free Public Library on Saturday afternoon as part of NHdocs, the New Haven Documentary Film Festival.

The festival runs from October 12 to October 22 at several locations across New Haven and Hamden, including Cafe Nine, Witch Bitch Thrift, the NHFPL Stetson Branch, Best Video Film & Cultural Center, and The Cannon, among others. Tickets, screening times, and more information are available here.

In the film, Redmon travels to Salemi to investigate what has become of the beloved video store—which nurtured his own interest in filmmaking. To his dismay, he finds Kim’s tapes in dire condition—some missing, others damaged by water. In a boisterous move, he decides to take matters into his own hands and save the collection, quickly becoming the film’s main protagonist. 

Inspired by 2012 film Argo, he concocts a plan to shoot a fake a heist movie inside the space where the collection is kept. He breaks inside, steals the films, loads them into the back of a truck, and brings them, eventually, back to New York.

“They cried out to me. The movies asked me to help them escape,” Redmon declares in one scene.

Perhaps to its detriment, the film abandons any kind of investigative rigor in this whirlwind of a climax. Several narrative strings are left untied as Redmon hastily ushers viewers along his quest. At one point, he follows an entourage of city administrators—some of whom had ties to the mafia, the film suggests—under a bridge. “This is where people go to get murdered,” he says behind the camera, but before viewers find out what happens, the scene ends.

Nevertheless, it’s thrilling, and by the end of the 84 minutes, one can’t help but cheer for Redmon.

At Saturday’s screening, the NHDocs team expertly paired Kim’s Video with Dustie Carter’s 14-minute short documentary Dumpster Archaeology. The film tells the story of a dumpster diver named Lew Blink, who looks for new narratives in the trash. Rather than simply taking useful objects like furniture, Blink seeks out old documents, photographs, and notebooks of people he has never known. 

“The dumpster is our last figure of our final true stories,” he intones as he digs through a pile of papers.

In an introduction before the two films, NHdocs’ Tony Sudol explained that the showing was originally meant to be held at Bow Tie Criterion Cinemas on Temple Street, where the festival has screened the majority of its films in past years. With the closure of New Haven’s only commercial movie theater last Thursday, however, NHdocs was forced to find another venue to showcase the film.

This was a serendipitous prelude to Kim’s Video and Dumpster Archaeology. In the films and in the festival, viewers witnessed the afterlives of narratives: what happens when movies can’t be shown in the way they were used to, what happens to stories after they are thrown in the trash.

“All three entities—New Haven Docs, Kim’s Video, and Dumpster Archeology—reflect a kind of interest in finding ways around official access and working around the official distribution model of films to find something that can exist outside of that,” said Luis Gonzalez, a New Haven-based filmmaker who attended the Saturday screening.

"Maybe the closing of the Bow Tie will herald a new kind of attention to turning things into spaces for screening and turning things into spaces where people can show work.”

NHDocs continues through Oct. 22, 2023 at locations across New Haven and Hamden. Tickets, screening times, locations and more information are available here. To listen to an interview with NHDocs Co-Founder Gorman Bechard and several partners, click on the link above.