i enjoyed this and hope you will too...

   A beloved N.Y. film collection finds a new home in Sicily
   By Sophia Hollander
   Tuesday, February 10, 2009


   NEW YORK: In 1987, when a broad-shouldered Korean immigrant named Yongman
   Kim opened a movie rental store on St. Marks Place in the East Village,
   he began with 8,000 films, from the odd to the adored.


   Kim originally started renting films from the corner of his dry-cleaning
   business on Avenue A. But the St. Marks store, which would eventually
   occupy an entire scruffy building in the middle of the block, quickly
   became a local institution.


   The eccentric selections intimidated some patrons. But many others,
   enthralled, frequently used the word "adventurous" to describe their
   forays through the shelves.


   It was an adventure that extended to the assembly of the collection. Over
   the years, Kim, now in his late 40s, built a staff that traveled the
   world scouring for additional titles - the only way to find obscure films
   in the pre-Internet age. By 2008, the collection had swelled to 55,000
   eclectic works, many impossible to find anywhere else.


   Then the world changed.


   The Internet had spawned Netflix, the elimination of late fees and
   no-effort rentals. The Internet also distracted consumers, stealing hours
   they might once have spent reveling in movies. In other words, the
   Internet was a force more powerful than the "Blood Sword of the 99th
   Virgin," one of the more esoteric works in the Kim's Video collection.


   At the store's peak in the 1990s, more than 200,000 people were listed in
   Kim's database, but by the end of last year, only about 1,500 of them
   were considered active members. Though customers still harbored an
   obsessive affinity for Kim's cult collection, along with its cantankerous
   employees and underground spirit, for too many of them, that affection
   had faded into a fond memory.


   "Kim's was the cutting-edge; that was always the business concept," Kim
   said the other day in one of a series of conversations about the fate of
   his video collection. "But ironically, I didn't prepare."


   Last September, in a move that swept through the Internet at viral speed,
   he issued a public challenge. In a notice pasted on a wall inside the
   front door, he wrote, "We hope to find a sponsor who can make this
   collection available to those who have loved Kim's over the past two
   decades." He promised to donate all the films without charge to anyone
   who would meet three conditions: Keep the collection intact, continue to
   update it and make it accessible to Kim's members and others.


   Offers poured in. Every one failed on one count or another. Every offer,
   that is, except one.


   The month that Kim posted his notice, a 42-year-old Italian graphic
   designer named Franca Pauli found herself intrigued by an article in La
   Repubblica, one of Italy's national newspapers.


   According to the report, an ancient town in western Sicily called Salemi
   had initiated an unusual renewal project. Founded around the fourth
   century B.C., the town achieved brief renown as the site where Giuseppe
   Garibaldi first planted the country's tricolored flag in 1860 during his
   quest for a unified Italy.


   But Salemi's moment of glory lasted only a day before the place slipped
   into oblivion. A devastating earthquake in 1968 proved the final blow,
   and for decades, the historic center sat abandoned, the town largely
   forgotten.


   Now, an ambitious effort was under way to reverse the damage.


   The town had invited prominent artists and intellectuals to assume
   control of the government. An art critic and onetime anarchist named
   Vittorio Sgarbi was elected mayor. A prince was put in charge of town
   planning, and a performance artist was officially declared alderman to
   nothing. The provocative Italian photographer Oliviero Toscani, whose ad
   campaigns for Benetton included a series on AIDS patients and inmates on
   death row, was named alderman of creativity.


   Pauli had worked with Toscani years earlier. Now, as president of a small
   arts foundation called Clio, an organization devoted, as she put it, to
   promoting "culture as an everyday thing, something you consume every
   day," she was fascinated by this effort to give artists political power.


   Two months later, on Nov. 23, she and her husband, Dario Colombo, a
   photographer and a partner in the foundation, packed up their four
   children and traveled to Salemi from their home near Venice for a quick,
   investigatory vacation.



   Sgarbi's renewal program, Progetto Terremoto - Project Earthquake - was
   beginning that very day. Already, the town was offering to sell houses in
   the historic center for a single euro in exchange for commitments to
   restore the buildings within two years. After a dizzying three days of
   questions, conversations and exchanged business cards, Pauli returned
   home determined to suggest a project of her own.


   Within days of her return, an itinerant graduate sociology student named
   Glen Hyman arrived in Italy. One of the items on his schedule was dinner
   with Pauli, whom he had met through mutual friends.


   Hyman, 31, had taught bread-making in China, sailing in Sweden and
   English in French villages. A doctoral student in Paris who lived largely
   on friends' couches, he was also a fan of Kim's Video, which he had first
   encountered some years earlier through a friend at New York University's
   film school.


   "It was like film heaven, in a way," Hyman said recently by phone from
   Brazil, where he was doing field work. "You couldn't make it up."


   That evening in late November, over a dinner of stew, homemade bread and
   fresh polenta, Pauli shared the story of Salemi with her young visitor,
   and he in turn talked about what was happening at Kim's. As he described
   the video store's collection and Kim's offer, Pauli listened in
   amazement.


   "My first thought was like, 'Wow, I might propose that to Salemi,"' Pauli
   said. "But really, it was almost like a joke. I really didn't expect this
   to come true."


   Nevertheless, unable to shake the idea, she e-mailed Kim, eager to gauge
   whether he would even consider an offer from Italy.


   He would, he told her, but only if the offer were serious. She started
   making phone calls.


   "It was almost like falling in love with this thing, and I was trying not
   to," Pauli said. "You're thinking, 'I'm sure someone from New York will
   take the collection,' so I was trying to be really cautious. But I also
   thought, maybe this community that's coming about in Salemi could be the
   right place after all to understand this, this amazing collection."


   As details about the possible arrangement leaked out, some Kim's
   customers took the news as a second, more serious blow. Some of them even
   confronted Kim in the store and by phone, challenging him to find a way
   to keep the movies in the community, or at least on the continent.


   And he says he tried. "Until the last minute," Kim said, "I was still
   waiting for some decent offer. It was very disappointing."


   According to his account, 30 proposals were submitted from throughout the
   metropolitan region, but for one reason or another, all fell short. And
   slowly he was won over by the enthusiasm of Pauli and the new team in
   charge in Salemi.


   "When I saw that we could have this collection," said Toscani, director
   of the town's Department of Creativity, "I thought it would be a great
   adventure, a great project." New Yorkers, he added, "shouldn't be upset
   because the movies are going to be in an incredible place; and on top of
   seeing Kim's movies, they can see the landscape around Salemi that is
   something very special, much better than New York.",


   Plans under way include what is described as a Never-ending Festival - a
   24-hour projection of up to 10 films at once for the foreseeable future.
   The town also plans a relationship with the Venice Biennale, a
   collaboration with the University of Palermo and a professional
   translation company to subtitle the films, a Web site with a searchable
   database and, eventually, the conversion of all Kim's VHS films to DVDs
   to ensure their preservation.


   Projection spaces and lodging for visitors will be created within a
   restored 17th-century Jesuit college, which will house the collection.
   The building, which now serves as the town's municipal museum, has a
   large inner courtyard perfect for public projections.


   Still to be worked out is how much all this will cost - the unofficial
   figure for what has happened so far is ?80,000, or about $100,000, though
   donated services may have made the actual cost much less - and where the
   money will come from. Because everything happened so fast - within two
   months - only now are budgets being prepared and sponsorships sought.


   "We all generally start projects from an idea, but then we have to
   calculate a budget and planning and timing and meetings," Pauli said,
   laughing. "This was the opposite. It was all friends and phone calls and
   meeting people in a bar."


   The team is working on provisions for Kim's members who venture to
   Salemi, including free access to films and discounted places to stay. The
   team is also exploring the possibility of letting Kim's members continue
   to "rent" films, either through mail order or, yes, Internet streaming.


   Today, Kim's entire collection is in containers and on its way to Italy,
   carefully packed to preserve his unique filing system, and scheduled to
   arrive in Palermo by Feb. 26 When the collection reaches Salemi a few
   days later, what Pauli described as a "human chain" of people will unload
   the cardboard boxes, carry them through the town's narrow streets and
   deposit the videos in their new home.


   Everyone involved realizes that duplicating in the Old World what existed
   in the New will be impossible. "But it's a new door we can open," Pauli
   said.


   Kim, for his part, lamented the end of the business that he loved, a
   business that once allowed him to carve out his own contribution in
   America. And he mourns more than the loss of his movies.


   "My passion was the introduction to my new community in U.S. of my film
   love," he said. "This kind of passion is no longer welcome, due to the
   new technology of the Internet."


   He looked off into the distance. "The future of the video rental business
   is really dying and declining so fast, so fast," he added. "I realized
   this thing so late."


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