God, I miss video stores. Kids these days don’t appreciate what a big deal these places were if you grew up in the eighties and nineties. There was no streaming, and we had to rely on what played on TV – randomly – to see movies we wanted to check out, unless of course we went to THE VIDEO STORE. I was born in ’81, and vividly remember spending much of my youth wandering the aisles, looking at box art. Heck, even if I didn’t want to rent a movie, I still went to the video store to hang out. It was a scene, and Alex Ross Perry (Her Smell) has just put together a must-see tribute called Videohaven, the trailer for which we can see embedded above.

The movie is narrated by Maya Hawke, which is appropriate, as her character on Stranger Things actually worked in a video store. Here’s a synopsis of the doc:

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), Alex Ross Perry’s VIDEOHEAVEN tells the story of an industry’s glorious, confusing, novel, sometimes seedy, but undeniably seismic impact on American movie culture.

That synopsis is pretty dead-on, as it was a social cultural hub to some extent. I actually worked at two video stores in my youth. I was fired by one for not letting a client leave with Battlefield: Earth (I saved him!), but then hired by another just to walk the aisles on Friday nights and chat with people about what movies they wanted to rent. Of course, that’s all gone now, so making movies about this short-lived but glorious phenomenon is all the more important. 

Videohaven will be getting a staggered theatrical release this summer. It opens at NYC’s IFC Center on and at LA’s Vidiots on , and expands from there. I sure hope it hits Montreal, as I’d love to go see this with some of my fellow video store pals.