In the upcoming film "Video Visions," director Sergio Rico tells the loosely-fictionalized story of a real-life store: Video Visions, in Chatham, New York. The store, which was owned and operated by Steve Campbell from 1984 until his death in 2024, was a beloved destination for film lovers around the Hudson Valley. Rico, whose family moved to Chatham in 2008, spoke with WAMC's Sam Dingman about his memories of Video Visions, and why he felt it was important to memorialize.
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
SERGIO RICO: I remember even biking many miles to get to Video Visions - maybe sometimes without my mother's explicit permission - to go and get get videos. And I think in a place like Video Visions, where you might not find more than two or three copies of a film, you could instead spend time in the foreign film section, where you might find titles that you had never even heard of.
DINGMAN: Sergio, you're describing an experience that doesn't exist very much anymore. You ride your bike several miles to get to the video store. You have your heart set on renting this one particular film. It's not there, so the choice that you are left with is, "Well, here I am in the foreign film section. I guess I'll find something else, that perhaps someone here at the store can recommend me, because they know I intended to rent this other thing."
RICO: And for me, the experience translates to film and cinema not being a one-way street. It's a dialogue, and it's a dialog of preference, of sentiment. And I think that's sometimes where some of the best journeys start.
DINGMAN: You're making me think of one of my favorite moments in the film, which is when there's a TV journalist who comes in, and they have a copy of "Wild at Heart," starring Nicolas Cage. And she reaches out, and she picks it up off the shelf, and she has this moment like, "Oh my God, I remember this box being in my parents' bedroom. I've never seen it!" And Oscar, in the film, says, "Well, you could rent it. You could watch it." Like, all of a sudden, you could understand your parents at a deeper level.
And then she's like, "Oh, I would love to, but I don't have a VHS player." But her cameraman, who's standing right there, says, "Well, I have a VHS player. You could come come over to my house and watch it." So all of a sudden, she's going to watch this movie that she knows her parents loved - that was important to them. But she has no idea what it's about. She's going to deepen her relationship with the cameraman, which it seems like is sort of a burgeoning thing that they haven't yet explored. And that's all going to happen because she walked into this physical place, had a conversation with Oscar, and saw a physical copy of the movie. And all of a sudden, her whole life is going to change.
RICO: Thank you. Yeah, that's a very important scene, and a scene that I feel like happened time and time again at a place like Video Visions. And for me, it kind of comes down to being able to access parts of ourself that perhaps we didn't even know were lying dormant within us. I think films do a really good job at trying to present a version of life that we want to inhabit.
DINGMAN: Well, it seems to me in the film that that is very much the journey that Oscar is on. He has found the only version of his life that seems to make sense to him by working at this video store. What is your relationship to that dilemma?
RICO: Well, a few years ago, Video Visions was still completely operable. I could I could walk in, I could talk to Steve, I could get a recommendation, I could find my movies, and that for me became a ritual. And then one day, there was a closed sign on the store. At first, it was confusing, you know? Steve was, without fail, opening the store. I mean, I have a little video postcard of him opening the store in the middle of a blizzard.
And one week turned into two weeks, and that's when I started to knock on his door to call his neighbors. And I found out that Steve was sick, and unwell, and unable to open the store, but that he was coming back. One day, the store did open again, and as soon as I got in there, I went straight up to Steve and I said, "I know now what Video Visions means to me." And it's not just an old video store that stayed open, but really kind of a stand against a changing tide, a beautiful effort to swim upstream and to really stay open for people who needed movies.
DINGMAN: Again, I feel like this is something that we see reflected in the film. As an example, there's one guy who is a military veteran, and he spends all his time in the war movie section. I felt like in that guy, you're seeing somebody who has had this massive experience in his life, and is looking for a way to put it in context, and something that significant really, you need something like a movie.
RICO: Totally, yeah. I think that certain films really try to respect and acknowledge certain histories that people have experienced. Movies are not just a quick entertainment, not just something to pass time, but really, are...is the town becoming visible to itself? Is the country or the nation becoming visible to itself? Is the globe becoming visible to itself? Being ourselves also reflected, and becoming visible back to u? And that's really what I wanted to talk about in "Video Visions." Being able to reserve a material connection to that, being able to go and find your movie, pick it off the shelf, take it home with you, bring back these actors into your house, and they can be in your living room and making an entrance as if...as if it was real.
