Soar 9 points! That's awesome! Fans across the country are waiting for this "best of the year"!
In 1979, Kim Yong-man, who had completed his military service in South Korea, set foot on the land of New York with a dream...
Youngman Kim, a young man in his early 20s, owned a dry cleaner. Business is not booming, but it is also so-so, and it is reasonable. One day, he had a flash of inspiration and put a few pirated DVDs on the shelves, and if he ran into interested customers, he could earn an extra rent. 
Unexpectedly, more and more people came to rent discs. The side business actually slowly passed the main business. Kim smelled a business opportunity and ran to open a video store...
At that time, access to movies was very limited, but the problem did not stump him. For example, go to various film festivals to collect films that have not yet been released; Go directly to the embassy in New York to copy the source....In Kim's video store, there were the rarest, most special, and most popular movies in the world at that time, and it was precisely because of the massive resource library that Kim's business became more and more prosperous, and he opened seven stores in a row. One of the most popular, existsMore than 55,000 films, the number of members is exceeded250,000 people....The Coen brothers, Quentin Tarantino and other bigwigs are regulars. 
Of course, pirated discs have caused a lot of trouble. Kim received a lawyer's letter from the great director Godard and was also raided by the FBI, but this did not stop the tenacious growth of the video store. 
It has built a spiritual high ground for film lovers in the fallen city of New York, a film festival that never ends...Until one day, the video store suddenly disappeared. A young man who is obsessed with seeking the truth has caused an uproar....
At last year's Beijing Film Festival, this magical and bloody documentary was hard to find, and the audience applauded three times after the screening. And with 8A high score of 9 (currently 8.)8 points), selected into the list of "Douban's highest-rated documentaries in 2023"....Someone commented:The "bloody case" caused by a video store, the director's commotion is worthy of being recorded in the history of film, it can be seen that life is a surreal movie, and each of us is a unique ghost director....This is one of the films that Raven most wants to introduce"Kim's Video Store".
Since the turn of the millennium, people's lives have changed dramatically. The flow of ** on the stage of history, so that the audio-visual rental market suffered an unprecedented devastating impact. You can easily find the resources you want from the Internet, and copy them at will, and the entertainment method of "Tao Die" has gradually been forgotten by the times. Kim's video store will not escape the fate of closure...
Those tens of thousands of movies are not only the hard work of Jin He and the clerks for many years, but also a better collection than any university in the world, and their value cannot be measured by money. Where do they belong? Kim's Public Statement:55,000 films were donated free of charge.
After the release of Kim's public statement, more than 40 schools and institutions submitted applications to Kim, and everyone was eager to see through it. In the end, Kim chose the small town of Salemi in Sicily, which is just over 60 kilometers away from where "The Godfather" was filmed...Salemi promised that the films would be properly stored in the Municipal Museum, and that the official would provide accommodation for future members of the video-visual store, and that when the films were digitized, they would be open to members free of charge.
Everything seems to be going in a good direction....But years later. Kim's video store has evaporated from the world, and there is no news. What is its current status? In July 2017, by chance. The film's director, David, who is also a huge movie fan, takes the camera with him and embarks on a journey to find a video store...
He came to the legendary birthplace of the ** party, and after some inquiry, he found the "missing" video store. From afar, he saw....The new home of the video store is not a museum with the warmth of history, but an ordinary warehouse, and it is unattended. The signboard of "Kim's Video Store" used to be the spiritual banner of countless movie fans, but now it has faded the strongest and most rebellious color after years of wind and sun.
David pushed through the hidden door and walked into the warehouse. The scene in front of him made David's heart half cold...Moss had grown in the corners of the leaky walls, DVDs were piled up on the floor in a haphazard manner, and many boxes were pulped and heavily damp. I picked up a video disc, but it was empty, and the disc was long gone...And the latest rummaging traces are a few ** films.
Even the world's top universities can't ask for a resource library has been ruined like this...Isn't this a blatant fraud!? David accidentally sets off the alarm and calls the police. According to the agreement of the year, members like David have the right to visit and rent for free. But the other party warned him sharply:Only with the mayor's approval can you enter Kim's video store. David had to move out of the original owner to avoid *** embarrassment...
Why did video stores fall into such a situation? Deep down, a voice beckons him to uncover the truth of the incident...
David finally got in touch with Kim. This man, who is as mysterious as the ** party in the mouth of others, is a businessman who is gradually drifting away from movies. When David chatted with him about the past of the video store, Kim began to ramble, saying only that he regretted donating tens of thousands of films to Salemi. Because, the other party is a troublesome person. An uneasiness poured into David's body....
After saying goodbye to Kim, David began an in-depth investigation. He learned the ins and outs from the chairman of the Anti-Black Investigation Committee. It turned out that the then mayor of Salemi was accused of having ties to the ** party, and was investigated for five years before and after, and was finally removed from the mayor's position. Kim's video store was also involved in the case. Shortly after this interview, the chairman of the committee died late one night, the investigation into the case was terminated, and the charges against those involved were dropped. It's so unusual....
Falco David, chairman of the Anti-Black Investigation Committee, began digging up the former mayor's material. The former mayor has a lot of background. He is not only the Deputy Minister of Culture of Italy, a member of the European Parliament, but also a very popular public figure, selling thousands of tickets for a single lecture tour...On every topic, he could go on and on for hours. But when David mentioned Kim's video store, the other party was vague and hurriedly changed the subject...
Former Mayor of Salemi Sgabi.
Once, David wanted to go to the warehouse with the other party. Unexpectedly, he was taken by the other party's convoy to the bottom of a high-speed bridge. There, it is the place where the ** party kills people and kills people. Realizing that something was wrong, David quickly turned the car around with his companions...
Another time, David ran into a political broker who was inextricably linked to the former mayor and was suspected of being a huge amount. Facing the camera, the other party strongly argued, insisting that he had never touched Kim's video store...
In fact, the facts are quite clear. The introduction of those tens of thousands of movies is just a way for politicians to beautify their achievements. Movies that have inspired and accompanied countless people are now "imprisoned" in a dark and damp warehouse, dusty, damp, moldy...Every time he thought about this, David was extremely depressed.
Some people may ask: is it possible to make a big deal out of a bunch of broken movies, going back and forth between New York, Seoul, and Sicily in search of the truth? As David saidCinema is a testimony to existence. It retains the remnants of life that was once lived. Ghosts, ghosts....When they are carefully organized into archives, it is our collective memory of the dead.
Based on these realizations, David decided to find a way to bring King's video store back to New York. The first thing that came to his mind was the original owner of the video store. Today's Kim, although he is a successful businessman, is involved in a complex chain of interests after all, which is beyond the scope of Kim's ability. Kim means powerless....
David didn't have a clue, so he read the film with his head down, hoping to find the answer he wanted from the movie. One day, he was awakened by an old documentary called "The Crime Touch of Art". This ** is about the director who stole one of Hitler's favorite paintings and gave them to a Turkish family....David is reminded of the Oscar-winning film "Escape from Tehran": a fictional film that commits theft and successfully rescues a group of people...
The Criminal Touch of Art (1976).
Escape from Tehran poster.
What a grotesque and genius idea to do a fake show! So, David wrote a fake script about stealing Salemi's movie and hiring several fake actors. With the mayor's permission, David got into action...This is a just robbery of "returning film freedom in the name of film". Wearing the masks of Chaplin, Hitchcock, Godard, Jackie Chan, Ingmar Burgman, Agnès Varda, Jim Jarmusch and other filmmakers, they emptied the warehouse.
David shipped a batch of films back to the U.S. first, and the rest was packed in a container and hidden somewhere miles away. The surrealism of the film shines into reality. It's incredible....Director David is a veritable die-hard movie fan. In this "Kim's Video Store", he blurs the line between documentaries and feature films with the narration of old movie plots according to life experiences, and writes a love letter to the movie emotionally. For example: I walked into the store and there was a band playing live, and even though it was noisy, all the sounds were still, and the movie calmed me down, and I immediately knew that I had found a new home, and I felt relieved, just like Diana in "Dream Demon" (1988 British horror film) woke up from a nightmare....
The shadow stalks that appear from time to time are also very interesting. For example, "Godard did everything right", "The Coen brothers have been waived of late fees"....But compared with the evaluation on the Internet, it is not difficult to find that "Jin's Video Store" is obviously more popular with Douban fans. Why does a documentary that has nothing to do with China and is so far away from us make countless Chinese fans addicted? Probably because,In the distant past, we all opened the doors of Kim's video store...
It was an era of material scarcity, people did not have too distant desires, and the abundant pirated discs fairly built a door to a different world for people from all walks of life, where light and shadow were intertwined, infinitely beautiful - vigorous Hong Kong films, Southeast Asian horror films, whimsical Japanese animation, Hollywood commercial masterpieces, obscure European literary films, Taiwanese idol dramas that contracted the entire youth...
I will always remember the documentary "Pork Ribs", on a certain day, I found a DVD in a dilapidated video store, and my heart was stirred for a long time after watching it. That movie made me realize that in the era of grand narratives and the praise of suffering, we can still find the stories of ordinary people who have been recorded in a corner called "cinema". That movie was made by a Fenyang kid, called "Xiao Wu"...
At that time, there was no network disk, and the ancient resource gods used pirated discs to satisfy countless people's yearning for movies and a certain spiritual highland. At that time, some people would search for Imamura Shohei's "Narayama Festival Examination" in different cities for nearly 20 years. If nothing else, love is the rarest.
Shenzhen's "King of Banned Films" pork ribs Dai Jinhua saidPirated resources have fed the cultural tastes of generations of Chinese. I think that's our common memory coordinates....David's "Art Defense" has a happy ending. After two years of negotiations, an agreement was reached that the remaining films would be shipped back to New York to be housed in the Alamo Drafthouse theater in Manhattan. The new Kim Studio, which opened to the public in March 2022, has rented out more than 1,700 films. At the opening ceremony, the new owner said:As long as humanity does not become extinct, King's Video Store will always exist....
The reopened Kim Audiovisual Store ** from Douban netizens@lang This is a fan's story, but also a maniac's story. King once asked David incredulously how he did it. David replied to him: Many filmmakers have helped, including Chaplin, Hitchcock, Godard, Jackie Chan...This complex world needs the expression of madmen, the creation of madmen, and the struggle of madmen to create expensive beauty. Even if it's just a little bit...