Country
USAYear
2025Length
173'
Category
ExperimentalPremiere
Italian
Screenplay
Alex Ross PerryEditing
Clyde FolleyProduction
Andrew Adair, Jake Perlin, Daniel Herbert, Alex Ross PerrySynopsis
Socio-cultural hub, consumer mecca, and source of existential dread; the video rental store forever changed the way we interact with movies. With narration by Maya Hawke over footage culled from hundreds of sources (from TV commercials to blockbuster films), Videoheaven tells the story of an industry’s glorious, confusing, novel, sometimes seedy, but undeniably seismic impact on movie culture.
In collaboration with Cinema Godard – Fondazione Prada and Museo Nazionale del Cinema.
Biography
Alex Ross Perry was born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania in 1984. He attended the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University and worked at Kim’s Video in Manhattan. He is the director of the films Impolex (2009), The Color Wheel (2011), Listen Up Philip (2014), Queen of Earth (2015), Golden Exits (2017), Her Smell (2018), Ghost: Rite Here Rite Now (2024) and Pavements (2024). He has directed music videos for Pavement, Ghost, Kim Gordon, Sleigh Bells and many more. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Statement
The movie was about six years old by the time of COVID, but it went up a full gear during 2020 and 2021, only because the film’s editor, Clyde Folley, finally had more time to chip away at it, because with movie theatres closed in New York, people like us had nothing to do. The research was heavy at the beginning, but Dan Herbert’s book provided that road map, which ultimately became the film’s structure. It starts off very factual, statistic-heavy in the early years of video stores, and as it moves on, the second half of the movie is my thematic analysis on what happened after the heyday of video stores, or what all these clips meant, or mean in retrospect. You can’t find fault with the facts at the beginning — because Dan is a real academic — but somebody other than me could arrive at totally different conclusions about the decline of video stores and how that played out onscreen. I guess that’s the same as academia: two papers on the same movie, both reasonably well-argued, neither what the filmmaker intended.
— Alex Ross Perry
Archival materials
Excerpts from approximately 200 feature films, TV and animated series, advertising clips, promotional and corporate videos, from The Big Sleep (1916) to Madame Web (2024).
Screenings
