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Hey, do you know Kim's Video?
Excuse me.
Maybe you know, do you know Kim's Video?
You got an address?
No, it used to be here, but it's gone.
Yeah, a lot of things used to be here and they're gone.
Yeah, we're seeing that here too.
I just wanna rent a movie.
And Kim's Video used to be here.
Do you know what happened to Kim's?
Probably went out of business.
But...
It probably did.
Because nobody rents videos anymore.
Do you know Kim's Video?
I'm looking for Kim's Video.
It used to be there.
- Yeah? - Yeah.
Do you know Kim's Video?
I do.
- Were you a customer? - I was.
And how was it?
It was great.
Yeah, it was great. Do you know what happened to Kim's Video?
No, I don't.
Okay, I'm looking... - I'm trying to figure out what happened to Kim's Video.
Because I used to be a member as well.
- Oh really? - Yeah.
I think it's just the digital age, right?
Put him out of business.
I grew up not too far away from Paris, Texas.
In the middle of nowhere.
The fictional setting for Wim Wenders' movie
in which Travis Henderson is lost in a desert.
And it was Wenders movie that sparked my passion
to make my first movie on hands.
My parents were 17 years old when I was born.
When I was six, they sent me to live
with my grandparents.
That's when I became obsessed with movies.
Late at night, voices would call me to watch movies.
And I would sneak out of bed to see them.
Like Carol Anne in "Poltergeist."
I would reach out and touch the screen.
To feel the static electricity traveling throughout my body.
Imagining it was ghosts from the other side.
One night, I turned on the television
and "Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger" was playing.
I remember the terror I felt.
The fear on the faces of the heroes
who went to faraway lands and unexpectedly battled monsters.
Movies to me weren't imaginary, they were real.
And sometimes I found it difficult
to distinguish between fiction and reality.
One time I drove all the way to Austin
to search for the characters
in Richard Linklater's movie "Slacker."
I wanted to make movies and also be around them.
But in rural Texas, the closest place
to find movies was at Walmart.
And I eventually worked there when I was 15 years old.
Just to be around movies.
One evening my manager, who resembled the master
in "Manos: The Hands of Fate,"
asked me to sit down for a talk.
To my surprise, he removed some VHS from a garbage bag
and said, "I found these movies in our dumpster outside."
He accused me of hiding the movies in the garbage bag
and making a plan to steal them later that night.
Similar to "Isle of Dogs," we had a stand off.
We fought.
I lost.
He told me:
Get out of here and don't come back.
Years later, I started hearing voices
that resembled the same ones in "Clean, Shaven."
And they told me to leave.
You'll have to leave!
I moved to New York and I lived in Brooklyn.
But my favorite neighborhood was the East Village.
On my way home one night, I asked a group
of people hanging out in front of a club
where I could find movies.
They looked at me dumbfounded and said,
Kim's Video.
I walked into the store and a live band was playing music.
And even though the music was loud,
all sound stopped.
The movies made me calm.
I knew immediately I had found my new home.
I felt relieved.
Like Diana waking up from her nightmare.
I immersed myself in the collection.
The movies made me feel safe.
They had so much stuff that
you couldn't find anywhere.
You know, and bootlegs of
things that didn't exist.
out on VHS or DVD.
ephemera and stuff from Europe
and the most obscure titles.
It was like a treasure trove.
My favorite movies I found at Kim's
were made in New York City.
Especially the East Village.
I loved how they transported me to a place and time
that no longer exists.
At the time, this is 1987, stepping foot
into this video store, it was, wow.
I'm stepping into the
gold mine of cool.
We're taking it upstairs.
Without passes, you don't take nothing upstairs.
We're gonna deliver that tape right now.
Don't make a move and you won't get hurt.
- Come on! - You hear me?
It was just this weird
little headquarters
for a lot of watching and
thinking about movies.
And it was just the place to get weird movies.
But a lot of these movies, when you see
the old days in New York and you see, you know,
all up and down the East Village
it's just so shocking because it was so dangerous.
And there would be these weird, bombed out buildings
where they would be lowering down
these little cans and people would be lining up
to get their heroin.
And if the police came they could just sort of scurry
into these buildings and not be found.
I think that's in "Mixed Blood"
the Paul Morrissey film.
You know, when I watch "Taxi Driver" now
I don't think, oh god, that looks scary.
I think, oh damn it, why isn't like that again?
I miss it so much.
By the time I got to New York
the East Village had been gentrified,
boutique stores had replaced burned out buildings.
Yet, the ghosts of the past
are very much alive in the present.
Kim's Video was born out of this history.
It collected these stories.
And it gave them a home.
The owner of Kim's Video was Yongman Kim.
The 21-year-old Korean immigrant
who arrived in New York City in 1979
after serving in the Korean military.
He owned a dry cleaning business
and he had an idea to place several
bootlegged copies of VHS in display shelf
for people to rent.
Turned out Mr. Kim's video rental business
was more successful than dry cleaning,
so he opened his first video store.
from Europe and the US.
Kim's Video has more than 27,000 movies
from 44 countries all over the world.
The most well known store was Mondo Kim's
on Saint Marks Place.
Mondo Kim's had more than 55,000 movies
and 250,000 members.
Mr. Kim sent employees to different
international film festivals
to search for and find movies that had never been released.
We are like the dreamer who dreams
and then lives in the dream.
He grew his collection by requesting
movies from embassies in New York City.
He copied their VHS and then rented
those movies in his store.
Word spread.
Companies complained.
And the FBI raided Kim's Video in 2003.
We were actively
cultivating rare films.
We were really proud of those tapes.
The counter was right
in front of the racks
of bootleg VHS tapes.
We would watch these guys in suits
take out these bags and clear out rows
and rows of VHS tapes.
About a week or so later Mr. Kim
would come into the store with one of his staff
and they would replenish the entire row
with all new bootlegs.
One movie that Mr. Kim bootlegged
was Godard's "Histoire du Cinema."
An essay film as a collage of images.
Show in this scene with Godard's face
superimposed on paintings.
Jean-Luc Godard's lawyers
sent a cease and desist letter.
I'm proud that we've made that available for people.
We felt like we were above the law.
Like the law said: ownership mattered.
We said: film knowledge matters more
than ownership over movies.
I think there will be changes for video in the future.
Like music, video will not stay within a single form.
It will be directly connected via computers.
As physical media gave way
to digital streaming, Kim's customers moved online.
The physicality of the object is now dematerialized.
One by one Mr. Kim closed each of his seven video stores.
But the final store, on Saint Marks Place,
had one of the most eclectic, rare collections
of 55,000 movies anywhere.
Mr. Kim issued a public announcement
to donate his entire collection.
A small town in Sicily called Salemi asked
an American sociologist to write a proposal
and give it to Mr. Kim in person.
Salemi had lots of
space and was looking
for arts projects and
Kim had a big collection
that needed space.
It was a beautiful building
and they designated it for this purpose. Well, we were told that it was designated for this purpose.
Pictures of it went into the proposal to Kim
that was posted on big A1 sheets in his shop
to assuage his members that it was going to a good home.
Had no one else shared that with you?
No, no one else shared it with me.
That's really weird.
It's the thing. It's the promise.
Do you mind reading some of it?
The City of Salemi hereby proposes
not only to host the collection,
but also to give it new life by ensuring
continued growth of this cultural treasure.
Furthermore, a limited number of sleeping quarters
are reserved for use by Kim's visiting members
to ensure a hospitable welcome at the collection's new home.
The town of Salemi is planning to launch
the never ending festival, a nonstop public projection
of Kim's video collection DVDs in their new home.
Salemi promised to digitize
the entire collection and give free access and rentals
to former Kim's Video members.
Then I went to New York and I sat with Kim
and I talked to him about it.
He had read the proposal,
we shook hands, and he agreed and that was the deal.
And then I called Italy from outside his shop
and told them that he was in,
and then we started putting the wheels in motion
of getting the collection moved.
Just how could anybody
think for a second
that sending this entire
thing to another country,
even though they say, well any
member who walks in the door
is welcome to access the collection.
Just what on earth could someone have been thinking
that this to them made more sense than NYU saying,
we will take it.
As legend has it, those were the options he was faced with.
We had over 40
schools and institutions
apply for the donation to
accommodate to their places.
And I think it was a good idea
and better idea to send to Salemi.
The way that I found out the store closed
was I got into the elevator to go to the third floor
to work and I saw a sign that
said that we were closing.
Also having to call all the customers for their late fees.
And some people had some insane late fees.
Including the Coen Brothers
who had something like 600 dollars.
In their defense, the Coen Brothers
were busy making their movie, "A Serious Man."
You know, we couldn't get them on the phone for that.
It's a little embarrassing now when I think about
how it felt when it left.
Because yeah, it was like
a friend moving away,
but more worse.
Because we knew we'd never see it again.
We also knew it probably was gonna just disappear.
The ship would disappear, something, you know?
Kim's Video leaving New York reminded me
of Kiarostami's movie, "Where is the Friend's House?"
In which a small child wants to settle
an injustice by returning a notebook to his friend's home.
I felt like his character, small,
and wanting to change an unjust situation
but not knowing how.
I would go to the site of the former Kim's Video store
like a pilgrim who visits a shrine.
Waiting for Kim's to return.
And that's when I started hearing voices again.
The voices were whispering to me,
like a scene from Fellini's "La Dolce Vita."
Did you ever feel me so close?
And I spoke back.
Where are you?
Can you hear me?
Where are you talking from?
From a far away place, somewhere in Sicily.
10:00 A.M. July 27th, 2017.
42 miles west of Corleone,
where the fictional movie "Godfather" was set.
Corleone.
Do you know Kim's Video?
Kim's Video?
Centro Kim's?
Talk to him. He speaks American.
Centro Kim.
I don't speak English.
Where's Kim's Video?
I don't speak English.
If you speak English you [can talk with him].
Wait, I will take a picture of you.
Do any of you speak English and can understand this guy? He's lost.
He's looking for I don't know what.
What?
I think he's looking for Centro Kim.
Centro Kim?
Yes, the videos Videos big.
Yes, that's Centro Kim.
Yes, but the problem, at this time, it's closed.
Isn't there anyone here who speaks English? How is this possible?
Me? No.
At school they don't teach English unfortunately.
Okay, I'll take him there anyway to Centro Kim.
The Centro Kim.
You need a car.
Maybe there's something he would be interested
in here. There's something in English here.
We're making a bad impression.
As soon as he gets back, he'll say Salemi is
a town of ignorance and no one speaks English.
Here's the English translation.
Yes, okay, but where's Centro Kim here?
No, this only covers the historical center.
This is so embarrassing. As always. This guy doesn't understand a thing here.
Movies.
DVD.
DVD. Centro Kim.
VHS.
But the problem is Centro Kim is closed.
Anyway, I'll take him there.
Yeah?
Your car?
Yeah, okay, okay.
Who is it?
Is Enrico there?
No, he's at work.
At work where?
At the castle.
Closed?
Whoa.
Ha.
Oh no. They're all wet.
Who came in there?
Uh, Nicole?
No, I am Enrico's wife. Did you go in there?
Open.
Was it open?
You live here?
I am Enrico's wife.
Trabajo?
I don't understand.
Hold on a second.
Habla Espanol?
No, no parlo.
Habla... uh, parlez vous Francais?
No English?
No English.
Let me call.
But why was the door open? Wait.
Enrico, someone's here. They opened the door. Was the door open?
Where the tapes are.
What do I know? The alarm went off.
There's a gentleman with a camera, an American.
You come now, please.
Do you have the key?
Do you speak English?
Eh.
Almost! What should we do?
I have a Kim's Video membership.
Do you understand?
Kim's Video membership.
In New York City.
Yeah, okay, okay, okay.
He's from Kim?
Yes he's an operator of the movie for Mr. Kim.
Now we figured out the situation.
Are you calling the mayor?
Yes, now we'll sort things out.
Listen, he was sent by Mr. Kim.
Okay, anyway, I know Mr. Kim.
Oh good! I don't know nothing about Mr. Kim.
You have the permission just to come here and...
I met you earlier.
Yes, he was in the square earlier.
Yes, but anyway it's a nothing.
No, I...
Okay, wait a moment.
To come here, to do some reports, you can do that.
You can.
I can?
You can't.
- I can't? - You can't.
Does he have a key? How did he get inside?
So you'll give me a tour?
No, no, I give you nothing.
You have no permission to come here inside.
Oh, but I do.
I have a Kim's Video collection membership card.
Okay, I hear, I know Mr. Kim and so on, but...
What is your name?
I am the local chief of police.
Okay, my name's David. David.
Okay, my name is Diego Muraca.
Okay, Diego.
And I wrote sometimes
to Mr. Kim
and I know personally
Mr. Kim, too.
Okay, when he came here,
the video, in Salemi.
Okay, anyway you have a paper,
where it's one permission to come here inside,
because he said immediately
you have the key from inside too.
No, the door is open.
The door was open.
Listen Enrico! He said the door was open.
Might be.
That's what he said.
Anyway, you can do nothing here.
Because here it must be the mayor.
Just the mayor here can give you the permission.
No other people.
See?
This is locked.
The door is locked. It could have been open but it's closed.
It was open?
No, it was closed. Comandante, it's locked.
It was open and now it's closed?
It's closed!
Close the camera.
And what's your name?
What's this important for?
I'm just trying to get to know people
because I'm gonna be here a lot.
I'm gonna be here for a long time.
It's Kim's Video.
No, anyway, it's not open to the public.
But it's supposed to be.
That was the condition--
But anyway...
Where do we go?
Huh?
Where are we going?
I don't know.
Ou est allez?
Yes. Yes, yes.
Music for film.
It's your music?
Yes.
You made this music?
Um... music for a... for movie.
Yes.
You made it?
Yes.
Presto.
Movie horror?
Okay.
You want that I speak?
Yeah, so what's happening?
Okay.
I am the local chief.
The town, I am...
Here, take it again.
Okay
You can cancel.
Okay
We're gonna do this thing.
Okay
Okay, David, welcome in Salemi.
I am the local chief of police anyway, from the town.
Or the town hall, anyway.
It's a pleasure to have you, to be present in Salemi.
Where Mr. Kim came and he gave us all the videos.
And now our administration is doing the best
to know, in all the world, the Mr. Kim videos.
Anyway, you know, David, the collection
when you came in Salemi, our mayor,
he received you and really all the people in Salemi
they are happy about your videos
and we hope in the future to be always
and to do the best for your memory.
And when you will be in Salemi,
you are always welcome.
Thank you, Mr. Kim.
That was nice.
And you were present with Sgarbi?
Right.
When the collection arrived?
Yeah.
What was it like?
When it...
Salemi! Salemi!
Salemi!
Vittorio! Vittorio!
Come on, open it Vittorio.
Let's see which is the first movie.
A porn movie!
Salemi! Salemi!
In 1968 Salemi experienced
a devastating earthquake that destroyed the entire town.
Its new mayor, Vittorio Sgarbi,
wanted to promote Kim's Video as part
of a multi-million dollar renovation project
to turn Salemi into an artist colony.
Berlusconi, seen in this photo,
appointed Sgarbi as Undersecretary for Culture
in Italy.
He was Commissioner for Culture in Milan.
Sgarbi's also a member of the European Parliament.
What did Sgarbi want with it?
Sgarbi was kind of an exile from Milano politics,
and he ended up becoming the mayor of Salemi
as a holding ground before he could return
to national politics.
There's the story of Salemi,
of a town that was destroyed by an earthquake
that was trying
to rebuild itself.
It was mobilizing all that it could
in order to attract people there.
In all the press releases from Salemi
they talked about Kim's Video.
That having the collection, possessing it,
was much more important than exploiting it.
Having the collection meant opportunity.
If you had the collection, you would be able to use it
to leverage money for doing something with it.
It's a horrible way to have learned
what due diligence means.
And we didn't do that.
I mean, I really...
I didn't really know who we were working with.
I didn't know what we were getting into.
It seemed like we could do something beautiful
with this beautiful collection and we didn't.
That sucks.
Now I know why the voices were speaking to me.
They were leading me to the collection
so that I would find it.
And just like Jeffrey in "Blue Velvet"
who unexpectedly finds something he wasn't looking for,
I found a damaged collection of movies.
That's leading me on a journey to find out
who's responsible for the neglect.
Or similar to Thomas in Antonioni's "Blow-up"
I convinced myself that I see things about Kim's Video
that may or may not be there.
I had too many questions and no answers.
Questions about why the collection was abandoned.
And so I decided to pursue Mr. Kim,
to find out if he could help me learn more
about what happened to Kim's Video.
I searched in his original dry cleaning business.
This was his first business.
Yeah, I don't know.
I went to the former Saint Marks
Kim's Video store.
The first floor is Barcade.
The second floor is a workout gym.
The third and fourth floor is a karaoke bar.
And no one could help me find Mr. Kim.
So I decided to talk to former employees.
I don't think I
ever met Mr. Kim.
I saw him.
He was very tall.
And good looking.
There was like this thing
that he was like, maybe, like scary.
I've never met anyone like Mr. Kim.
He seems like one of the scariest.
He's like super tall.
He looks like he's in the mafia.
There was just a lot of
rumors as to who he was.
We knew almost nothing about him.
He was still mythical.
Kim was always like a shadowy guy.
He was always very secretive.
He's definitely a legend downtown
for that period that he was in.
You know, Rafik,
Kim's, Jonas Mekas.
You know, Howard Gutenplan.
You know, the big film people.
I knew that Mr. Kim was
friends with Quentin Tarantino
and that they interacted
in some fashion whenever Mr. Kim
was making his feature.
Ah!
Yeah, yeah.
I started making this movie
knowing nothing about Mr. Kim.
And the more I explored,
the more enigmatic and mysterious he became.
Yeah.
It seems the myth of Mr. Kim
is more real than the person.
I watched Mr. Kim's movie, "One Third."
It's about a monk who spies on a teenage prostitute.
His movie only created more intrigue.
And it made me feel like a voyeur.
I think that air of
mystery is fostered by him
and also by the
terms of the store.
A great dad and church goer.
An upstanding success story in his community.
To also intersect with New York counter culture
and underground and the seedy side of film and art.
That's extraordinary.
I leave messages for Mr. Kim
with former employees.
And I send emails to different addresses
asking him to contact me.
Like Jack Terrier in "Blow Out" I continue
suturing together different aspects
of the life of Kim's Video.
To understand if it was deliberately
or accidentally neglected.
Like Harry Caul, I repeatedly tried to discern
what the voices were telling me.
Find out what happened to the tapes.
My frustration increases, because I can't understand
what happened to the collection.
Like Harry Caul, I become absorbed
by the process of trying to solve this jigsaw puzzle.
My curiosity takes me to Italy
where I meet a fixer who
gets me access to Sgarbi
so I can ask him questions
about Kim's Video.
He is the director from New York who came all the way to see you.
We will come later with you to the presentation.
Sgarbi's a rare European public intellectual.
He travels across Italy selling thousands
of tickets to his sold-out shows
of his analysis of art history.
He's a charismatic speaker and a fantastic showman.
His fans want his time and his autograph.
He's friendly and affectionate.
He's like a character from a Fellini movie.
His assistants accommodate his needs and wants.
He stays out all night visiting art museums and galleries.
He eats the best food and drinks the best wine.
He's surrounded constantly by
an entourage of people.
Sgarbi will speak hours about any topic.
But when I start asking him questions
about the unfinished project
of Kim's Video in Salemi, he evades.
Deflects.
Until one day, when Sgarbi was more relaxed,
I was finally able to approach him.
David has a curiosity.
Tell me.
How do you feel about the fact
at one point in Salemi it all ended?
Yeah, Salemi. That was just one story.
You're right.
It's something you started and didn't finish.
Are you angry or disappointed?
No, no. We also made a publication that explained everything I've done.
We had contacts with Tibetans in exile. We had
contacts with the Jewish world, the Muslim world.
But Salemi What we had put together, we started
to do the cataloguing. I think they finished it.
This was the biggest movie collection in America.
The owner was called Kim.
That was an archive that didn't exist in Sicily. This
guy, with digitization, internet, closed a big store.
He had every film in the world and donated them to us.
It was an important experience.
It's a sore spot.
He left after the phone call.
I followed and I tried to get into his car.
He told me it's time to leave,
but I pressed anyway.
We go with you?
No, there's no space.
We're getting in his car?
No, he's saying there is no space.
I left Sgarbi empty handed
and when I got back to New York, something eerie happened.
I received an unexpected text message
in the middle of watching "Twin Peaks."
In this specific scene...
And then my phone buzzed.
It was Mr. Kim and he asked me to call him.
All right, here we go.
Yeah.
Hey, Mr. Kim.
Hello?
Who is this?
There's a poor connection.
I don't know if it's my phone or yours.
Hello?
The connection was lost.
But Mr. Kim sent a
message with an address.
He said I could meet him
to talk about Kim's Video.
I arrive a day early, and I'm nervous
because of all the rumors I've heard about Mr. Kim.
And I don't know what to expect.
I start filming night scenes in Korea.
And testing my sound as a way to distract me
from my neurosis.
Okay, recording sound.
Now I understand how Ross McElwee felt
making his documentary, "Sherman's March."
In which he films his anxieties in in-between spaces
while trying to finish his movie.
Morning arrives quickly,
and I receive a text message from Mr. Kim
asking to meet down the street.
Um.
I get there on time.
But I'm having sound problems.
Should we go?
This entire facility, right,
that used to be like KCIA.
You know what the CIA is?
The Central Intelligence Agency.
Yeah, that's what this whole facility used to be.
KCIA.
So most members of this organization,
they don't know me, who I am.
They only know me as a business man.
So, please keep in your mind,
you don't disclose as my background
as a filmmaker and film background.
I saw Charlie Chaplin, the silent film,
16mm projection when I was eight years old.
That was the first time I watched a movie ever.
It was just amazing.
So, that's how I start my relationship with film.
When I got here when I was 21,
I started to work
18 to 20 hours a day.
I worked for not only just
for living for myself,
but also for my whole family.
And my two younger brothers and sister,
they were in the high school.
I was the only one capable to bring
the income to home.
Then I slowly went to film school
and I made Super 8mm film.
I didn't know what to do with that.
I realized there are millions of other filmmakers.
They are going to put a lot of movie in their garage
just to disappear.
That was the motivation why I started Kim's Video.
Can you talk about Sgarbi and Salemi?
Yeah, that part I'm a little
regret.
Why?
Because Sgarbi was an issue, a legal issue there.
A criminal issue.
Why?
I don't know the insider information.
I don't know.
I don't know what happened.
It's like a movie scene.
A movie scene of Scorsese.
And that comment by Mr. Kim made me nervous.
I don't wanna be in a Scorsese movie.
And I was wondering which scene he was referring to.
Look who's here.
What are you doing, what happened?
Had I been invited to dinner with the good fellas?
Jimmy will tell ya.
What happened? What happened to him?
You have the super light to spare!
Was I about to bring back the dead?
Rise up!
Fredrick!
I be obeying!
Or maybe I was inside
Rupert Pupkin's distorted mind.
I had more questions for Mr. Kim.
But he told me he couldn't answer them.
We fly back to New York.
Mr. Kim brings me to his house in New Jersey.
He hands me a VHS with archival footage
of a man named Falco on it.
Grab that one.
The VHS has footage of Mr. Kim
visiting his collection for the first time with Falco.
Oh, this is beautiful.
You did a good job.
It turned out that Falco led
a five year investigation into mafia ties
in the town of Salemi.
And Kim's Video got wrapped up in it.
The investigative commission
documented some infiltrations with the government.
There was a known
person in Salemi for over 30 years.
His name is Giuseppe Giammarinaro.
In the photos I found,
he looks friendly, approachable.
He has been accused of being involved in the mafia.
And the majority of his photos online
are with Sgarbi
Usually side by side.
During press conferences, Sgarbi denies
any association between Giammarinaro and the mafia.
Saying Giammarinaro is in the mafia is like saying
that the government's politics is influenced by Napoleon.
The mafia in Salemi does not exist.
Giammarinaro had been
under surveillance for five years.
He was arrested.
And his assets of 15 million Euros were frozen.
Falco said that Giammarinaro had illegally benefited
from money that was supposed to have been used
for public assets.
What's the relationship between Giammarinaro and Sgarbi?
I would prefer not to answer.
Okay, no. He can't answer.
Oh.
I can say that the investigation
and police wire tapping showed that.
Giammarinaro presided within Sgarbi's council.
He had no title or authority to do so.
Falco accused Sgarbi
of allowing the mafia to infiltrate his administration.
And removed him as mayor.
Was Salemi ordinary or extraordinary?
Extraordinary.
Mafia, mafia, mafia.
And just before I left,
Falco showed me a box
with the words "Salemi, Kim's Video" written on it.
He said that many of my questions would be answered,
but he couldn't speak right now
because the investigation was still active.
And shortly after this interview,
Falco died in the middle of the night.
The investigation into Giammarinaro stopped
and all charges were dropped.
Possible coincidence, but most unfortunate.
Part of my paranoid self wondered
if his death was a coincidence,
or if something more nefarious happened.
As suggested in the movie, "Black Dragons."
Nice fella. I hope you'll be happy.
Goodbye.
You're leaving?
Yes, I must.
How did the Kim's Video collection
get entangled with the mafia?
Will we see you again?
Who knows, in this crazy world.
And the only person
who can answer these questions is no longer here.
Cinema is a record of existence.
It retains traces of lives lived,
of phantoms, ghosts.
And when it's thoughtfully organized as an archive,
it's our collective memory of the living dead.
I turned my attention to convincing Mr. Kim
to get the collection out of Salemi
and return it to New York City.
It is really
beautiful here.
Cheers, thank you very much.
You're welcome.
Grazie.
Gracias.
Oh my.
Probably rain from there.
Yeah, rain, right?
Okay.
Alright.
Oh my gosh.
Mr. Kim!
Nice pleasure to meet you.
Nice pleasure.
Our mayor is here.
Oh, the mayor is here?
Do you know him?
Oh no, I don't. I don't know.
Okay, great.
It's our mayor!
Mr. Kim!
How are you?
Nice to meet you.
Welcome in Salemi.
Thank you very much.
Salemi has the collection,
better than any university in the world.
I am not sure what kind of assessment they have
from their perspective.
And I feel very sad that the collection
is not properly stored.
It's not properly managed.
And it's not properly maintained.
The place--
It's something that we already started,
however, I keep on waiting to.
The place was very moisture.
I only have half hour and I need to leave. How do you say at 12pm?
I have a problem because I need to leave and drop off my daughter at the airport.
I am the only one who can. Please tell him
because I don't want to appear disrespectful.
Our Mayor is saying that at 12pm
he must take to his daughter back to the airport
because she must leave.
And they can't stay after 12pm
They must go away at 12pm
Thank you.
I am sorry for the...
Let me just finish a couple more sentences.
Just ask him.
The moisture is very bad for the tape
and once the tapes get damaged,
there's no longer a value to talk about the collection.
It has been 10 years now.
But the collection is still not using it
for the public and the people.
That makes my feeling very sad.
Would you be willing
to reclaim the collection because Salemi
violated all the conditions?
And salvage what remains?
In response to your question,
yes.
I am not interested to claim or to argue
or to reopen all those conditional issues.
It's gone.
This is beyond my authority.
So, that's it.
That's it.
You know, sadly.
They didn't realize what they have.
Unfortunately.
That's how I feel about it.
It's sad, but it's beyond my authorities.
Finished?
Almost.
Okay.
This journey's not just an obsessive quest
to free the movie collection.
I also care about the collection,
and I'm angry that it's been neglected.
I want the collection to be restored.
I want restitution.
I want the collection to continue to have a voice
because it helped me make sense of mine.
I find out that Sgarbi will be in Salemi,
and I had an idea to bring him to Kim's Video
so he could see the damage.
I was hoping that he would come
to some sort of self-realization.
That the movies needed to be returned to New York City.
But sometimes life isn't like the movies.
It's even more strange.
Hey!
How are you?
Is everything all right?
Vittorio Sgarbi is just coming.
Oh he's coming now?
You can do something important
for the United States when you get back.
Oi, how are you?
He's making a documentary on Kim's.
Sgarbi, we want to go to Kim's Video, yeah?
Kim's?
Kim's. Centro Kim's.
Sure, we go to.
All right!
This is our Law and Order workshop. We organize school visits here.
We managed to screw Corleone, didn't we?
They're afraid of the word mafia.
If you create a Museum of Law and Order nobody would come.
I continue following Sgarbi everywhere he went.
Even though he pretends not to know who I am
or why I'm there.
And then I notice another person was also following Sgarbi.
At first I didn't recognize him.
When I approached him, I suddenly realized
it was Pino Giammarinaro.
It was a strange coincidence he was here.
Standing right next to me.
While making this movie,
I tried to reach out to him repeatedly.
And now I was watching him watching Sgarbi.
It seemed that we were both stalking Sgarbi
and we both wanted something from him.
Pino Giammarinaro made Sgarbi Mayor.
I grew up with the mythology of Pino Giammarinaro.
For me, it's as if he's always been here.
As many of his kind do he uses his power wherever it's required.
Giammarinaro, in 2008, controlled in his budget
a huge project of 800,000 euros
that was supposed to finance different projects,
not only the digitization of [Kim's] collection.
Only 30,000 euros were spent without producing anything.
When the fate of Kim's collection was decided he was always there.
I experienced the dismantling of the [Salemi] Municipality
as an unjust trauma during my time here.
It was a wicked, violent, and wrong action against Pino Giammarinaro.
I believe in doing politics in the fairest way
for what the politics were, what they are
and for what they'll be in this town.
Excuse me. What is your name?
Oh hey!
Are you Giammarinaro?
Yes.
Did you get my message?
Yes, I received your.
But.
But I can't do an interview because I was not there.
I didn't take care of the Centro Kim event.
I was not there at all.
If you want to know who took care of it, who worked for it, but I
I didn't do anything for Centro Kim.
I've never even been.
Also for the movies, absolutely never.
It's not possible that we'd meet without a camera?
Is it possible to meet without a camera?
Yes without a camera yes.
Yeah?
Okay.
Alright.
Ok, call me and we'll see.
Are you leaving?
Si.
Let's go to Kim's Video.
Ah.
Come on, Nico.
Tell him--
Am I gonna follow him in my car to Kim's?
We take our car?
Yes, yes. Your car.
He's going the wrong way.
Kim's Video is the other way.
Why did he say he was gonna go to Kim's Video
and then just drive right past it?
I kept following him.
Until his convoy arrived under a bridge.
Where are we?
Look at this, we're under the bridge.
We're under a highway.
This is where people go to get murdered.
Should we be nervous?
I convinced my translator
to go back to Kim's Video
to find a way inside the collection.
And it was at Kim's when I realized I had a problem.
I began to ask myself, why am I staking out
a building full of neglected movies
in the middle of the night in Sicily?
My compulsion had transfixed into obsession.
And the only way to stop my mania
was to free the collection.
These movies had taken possession of me.
Similar to "Videodrome."
Come to me now.
They cried out to me.
The movies asked me to help them escape.
Don't keep me waiting.
I am the movie collection.
I became the movie collection.
Please.
I go back to New York and I began watching movies
to help me come up with ideas on how to free the collection.
And the more movies I watched,
the more I began thinking about the overlap
between art, crime, and cinema.
And how the fictional depictions of crime in movies
such as "Bicycle Thieves," "Rififi,"
and "Thieves' Highway" influence reality.
I came across a 16mm documentary called,
"There is a Criminal Touch to Art."
By the German artist Ulay
and filmed by his partner, Marina Abramovich.
Ulay steals Hitler's favorite painting
and gives it to a Turkish family as a political act.
And that's when I had a thought.
Can committing a crime be a work of art?
Ulay took one painting with his getaway driver.
But Kim's Video has more than 55,000 movies.
I turned to fiction movies to learn
how to execute a heist.
"Bottle Rocket," "Grand Slam."
But especially, "Argo."
In which the main character, Tony Mendez,
pulls off a heist and rescues a group of people
by making a fake movie.
It doesn't matter, it's a fake movie.
If I'm doing a fake movie,
it's gonna be a fake hit.
I decide to do the same.
Hire fake actors, make a fake script.
I get help from anonymous people.
And the Mayor of Salemi grants me permission
to make a fiction movie inside Kim's Video.
784 kilos.
Okay.
You are again here?
You can't stop
your visit in Salemi.
Yeah? Salemi's another world, don't forget.
Because don't forget the Italian,
we discovered America in 14th century, '92.
Don't forget, okay?
The origin of the culture and the world
it's from Sicily.
Especially Salemi.
That makes you my godfather.
Ha, ha, ha, yes.
Bye, I see you.
It's carnival season in Sicily.
Salemi has its all night celebration.
And we show up to join the party.
I needed help to pull off my plan.
So on that night, I summoned the ghosts of cinema.
Okay, come here, David.
You're smiling, you keep smiling.
Because I'm nervous.
Okay.
What, depends on my answer?
Yeah, it depends a lot on your answer.
All right.
Well, you know that the first time
I went to Salemi I broke into the collection.
You know, the alarm went off.
But you know, and I told you the movies spoke to me.
Okay.
And I listened to 'em and I promised
the movies that I would come back one day.
Mm-hm.
And get them out,
because they told me they wanted to get out.
Okay, they wanted to go home.
Well, I did go back with a group of people.
And we broke back into the collection
and we took as many movies as we could.
And I know before you said that you weren't interested
in reclaiming the collection,
but I'm hoping now that you have interest
in getting the rest of the movies out
and back to New York.
Unbelievable.
This is the reason why you left?
Did they allow you to do so?
That's a good question, um...
I don't know that they allowed me,
but I had permission to go into the collection
and make a fiction movie.
But the fiction movie was a heist.
It was a theft.
You understand?
Unbelievable.
I never thought about this.
This is surreal.
I'm telling you this is really surreal.
You did it without my permission either, right.
So you could be a theft, you know?
You could be a thief.
Unbelievable.
So who did that?
You and Ashley?
Pretty surely.
And uh, we had help.
Like Jim Jarmusch helped.
Charlie Chaplin.
Yeah.
Maya Deren helped.
Alfred Hitchcock.
They all helped you?
Godard.
Yep. Agnes Varda.
A lot of filmmakers helped.
No Tarantino?
He might help,
I'm still trying to reach out to him.
He hasn't gotten back to me.
Oh, that's incredible.
That's incredible.
If Godard, my god, if he helped you,
I have no objection whatsoever.
And whatever he did, I believe in,
he did the right things.
So ah...
I have no doubt, I have no objection
and I just support whatever his decision made out of.
So...
So, you did the right thing then.
In the fiction movie,
we took all the boxes.
But in reality
we couldn't fit them all into the back of the truck.
The actors left Salemi,
and that's when I took the boxes and hid them in a dumpster
a few miles down the road.
And after midnight, Ingmar Bergman,
Barbara Loden, and I went back.
And we took the movies.
Salemi contacted me and wanted
to know what happened to the movies.
I told them, as a former member of Kim's Video,
I just checked out a few movies for my friends.
It's part of my fiction script.
And this action set in motion a series
of complicated negotiations for the next two years.
Mr. Kim challenged me and said that if I could find
a new home for the collection in New York City,
he'd help me get the rest of the movies.
I hope all this works out for you.
I spent more than a year passing
proposals back and forth to Mr. Kim
and 40 different institutions.
And eventually found an enthusiastic company
willing to display the entire collection
with free rentals in New York City.
Next, Mr. Kim and I had to work out
a contract with Salemi.
After more than a year of negotiation,
Domenico came up with a solution.
I have an idea but turn off the camera so we can talk.
Domenico wanted to establish
a business relationship with Mr. Kim
and promote tourism for Salemi
inside Kim's Video in New York City.
The relationship with Mr. Kim returns to be central. This is a very positive fact.
We'd like to conclude this collaboration and carry
forth a symbolic twinning between Salemi and New York.
Some of the conditions in the contract included:
One, no one will be held accountable
for the missing movies.
Two, Salemi receives an all expense paid trip
to New York City for seven nights
in which Mr. Kim publicly thanks the mayor
for caring for the collection during a public ceremony.
Three, Salemi receives free advertising
for the One Euro Home project inside Kim's Video.
I fly back to New York City
to give Mr. Kim the contract.
And we decide to meet at the former Kim's Video store.
You wanna go see inside?
I'd love to.
Yeah, let's go and see how much we can see inside.
While making this movie,
I noticed the parallels between Mr. Kim's story
and "Citizen Kane," with a twist.
Mr. Kim, a Korean immigrant who arrived
to New York City and worked in a fruit stand,
bought a dry cleaning business,
eventually developed an empire
of video stores in New York City,
and amassed an invaluable collection of movies
from around the world
and then lost them.
People repeatedly asked,
"Why are you investing so much time and effort
into freeing this video collection?
And just like Rosebud, this question remains
a piece of the Kim's Video jigsaw puzzle.
Which objects, which movies are significant to keep?
Mainstream movies?
Obscure movies?
Movies in the film canon?
I ordered a container
and I went back to Salemi to send the rest of the
collection to New York.
When I arrived to Kim's, the building was on fire.
And like "Citizen Kane,
I saw smoke from a distance.
And I was afraid the movies would burn to dust.
We called the fire department and no one showed up.
The situation reminded me of "The Mirror.
And finally,
I woke up from a dream
as feverish as the one in "Dream Demon."
The fire went out on its own.
And when the smoke cleared, the container arrived.
Okay, okay.
I go back to New York City
to greet the arrival of Kim's Video.
And I see the ghosts of cinema walking the streets,
preparing to enter their new home.
But what is home for an itinerate and abandoned
collection of lost movies on VHS and DVD?
What kind of unknown voices await me behind
the door of Kim's Video?
Come, come, it's Kim's Video.
Wait, wait.
You have a 600 dollar late fee.
Late fee?
What is late fee?
You owe money to Kim's Video.
Ah no, this is my brother.
Hold up, hold up.
- Is this everything? - No.
It's like half.
What?
When we started talking, and I mean,
don't take this the wrong way,
but there was a part
of me that felt like,
is this for real?
Or is this like a weird scam?
Honestly, it was a coin toss.
It was like, I really wanted it to be true,
and then when it was clear that there was actually
a sea freight container heading my way,
I was like, holy shit this is not a joke.
They're just all sitting
there, you know, in boxes
waiting to go through.
We got through 15,000 to 20,000 titles.
So, sorry if I doubted you initially.
From kinetic, to performance.
The magical, to the unbelievable.
Dreams, movies and life are indistinguishable.
There's a quote by the filmmaker Jim Jarmusch
that stuck with me throughout making this movie.
"Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration.
And don't bother concealing your thievery.
And always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said,
"It's not where you take things from,
it's where you take them to.
Yes!
Nobody died and Kim's Video will live forever!
Alright! Ladies and gentlemen,
a standing ovation for Mr. Kim!
Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you.
I'm so honored to be here with you all today
here in New York City.
This is where my story began.
To the Mayor of Salemi,
your help in coordination for the return
of the collection to New York City
is deeply appreciated.