Videoheaven

Alex Ross Perry’s decade-in-the-making essay movie, narrated by Maya Hawke, surveys the cultural impact of video stores via their representation on film and TV.

The first video stores emerged in the late 70s and, by the following decade, had become commonplace, especially in the US. They were initially regarded as a death blow for cinema; instead, the accessibility and shareable nature of VHS tapes and, later, DVDs went on to foster a deeper love of movies. By the 1990s, the immediately familiar space of the video store had itself become an onscreen staple, as seen in landmarks like Clerks, Muriel’s Wedding and Seinfeld. But the 2010s heralded its demise, capping off four decades of American cultural and social exchange enabled by physical media.

Filmmaker and actor Alex Ross Perry (Pavements, MIFF 2025) is the perfect candidate to undertake a deep dive into video stores, having himself worked behind the counter of legendary New York establishment Kim’s Video. Perry and his team assembled nearly 200 clips – extracted from sources as diverse as Body Double, Scream, The Simpsons, Stranger Things and even a Blockbuster training video – tracing changing tastes and times as they were immortalised on VHS. Loosely adapting Daniel Herbert’s 2014 book Videoland and inspired by Thom Andersen’s iconic 2003 essay film Los Angeles Plays Itself, this evocative and rivetingly encyclopaedic seven-part treatise on the video-rental era is pure catnip for cinephiles.

“Inter-generational and incredibly well-researched … Videoheaven is more than just a loving nostalgia trip, offering an insightful anthropological analysis of the use of the video rental store in an impressive range of [US] film and TV.” – Sight and Sound