Sundance Review: Ashley Sabin and David Redmon’s Documentary Kim’s Video.

Premiere on the first day of the Sundance Film Festival, Kim’s video is the perfect Sundance documentary, a playful and intelligent film that teases one thing and delivers another. Just like the one from 2012 Look for Sugarman went in search of a missing soul singer and uncovered a secret history of the anti-apartheid rebellion in South Africa. , actually two things: first, a deliciously shaggy dog ​​story that somehow connects a New York dry cleaner with the remnants of the Coen brothers, the South Korean CIA and the mafia, and second, a shrewd and actually rather moving reflection on the very real societal importance of film history.

The subject raises questions that even casual Manhattan visitors of a certain age have noticed: What happened to Kim’s video store chain, a filmmaker’s treasure trove of cinematic rarities and classics? And secondly, who was before this Kim, a shadowy figure who disappeared after apparently abandoning her collection as quickly as it had accumulated?

The film’s public face, co-director Redmon, belongs to the Nick Broomfield school of deceptive shyness, which he first encountered while stalking passers-by on St.’ The once iconic monument seems to have melted into the ether, but this collective amnesia will appear to be one of the film’s driving forces; Kim’s video isn’t just a long rant about gentrification or the transition from analog to digital, it’s a film about not taking no for an answer. As Redmon and Sabin crowd (largely off-screen), more doors open, each leading to a revelation as surprising as the last.

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The conventional wisdom is that in 2008, despite offers from the US, Kim unexpectedly donated his collection to a small town in Sicily called Salemi, on the condition that existing members of Kim’s shops could visit at any time and that the new owners it would do. . , finally to digitize the collection for posterity. It seemed too good to be true, and of course it was, because nothing was heard after that.

Part of the fun of Kim’s video is that there is clearly more to this story than Redmon and Sabin admit, much like the creators of Look for Sugarman knew their subject was alive and (sort of) well and even toured Australia before their Sundance premiere. The first example of this is when the filmmakers arrive in Salemi, they meet a man named Enrico Tilotta, composer of John Carpenter-esque soundtrack music, who then (although never mentioned) scores the film and does a very good job. And after mistaking the shopkeeper – Yongman Kim, who arrived in New York from South Korea in 1979 when he was just 21 – as an enigma, he reappears halfway through to reveal an important presence in the film.

The story of Kim and what happened to his collection of 55,000 “strange films” after they arrived in a city nearly wiped out by an earthquake in 1968 would be rich enough to warrant the film itself and sophisticated, creative corruption to maintain some of the known art. to unveil lovers of recent Italian cinema. but Kim’s video go a step further, and what at first glance looks like just a fair-use evasion document suddenly becomes much more in-depth, using archival material as a new layer of commentary, excerpts from To blow up, blue velvet and La DolceVita To illustrate Redmon’s reasoning.

All of this comes together in the film’s unexpected climax, a daring one coup of the cinema Worthy of Orson Welles F for fake, in which the filmmakers, assisted by Charlie Chaplin, Jean-Luc Godard, Jim Jarmusch, Agnes Varda and many others, pull off a daring heist to save Kim’s collection. It would be sharp to reveal how, but this happily chaotic payoff confirms a key tenet of the film’s thesis: “Cinema is a record of existence,” says Redmon. “It contains traces of lived life, of hauntings, ghosts. And when carefully organized as an archive, it is our collective memory of the living dead.”