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[title]Opening just over a decade ago in Darlinghurst, Sydney’s self-proclaimed “last, best” rental store for DVDs and Blu-Ray still has a customer base that is larger than you’d think. That is why the community outpouring was so notable when recently its owner and proprietor Ben Kenny announced that the store was going on the market. If a new owner (or owners) are not found, the store will close for good.
You might be asking, who still physically goes to rent a movie nowadays? According to Kenny, people come to Film Club to find the movies you can’t find on streaming services. With 25,000 titles to browse, you can uncover the filmographies of great auteurs, like Stanley Kubrick and Jean-Luc Godard, and sought-after titles in the cult, queer, foreign and Australian movie genres. Some people don’t have access to streaming. Others just like the old-school ritual.
“We've never explicitly leaned into that VHS nostalgia sort of vibe, but it definitely just comes with the territory. Like, the number of people who come in and you can see in their eyes, they're instantly being transported back to being 10 years old on a Friday night at Blockbuster,” says Kenny.
Photograph: Film Club/Manon Keus
“I think video stores have always just been, especially for kids and young adults, like a portal into other worlds that they haven't discovered yet. It's sort of like a very safe way to experience other cultures and other people's lives before you actually go out there and live your own, I guess.”
When Film Club opened in 2010, it was the fulfillment of a life-long dream for Kenny. The entertainment streaming options at the time weren’t quite as dominating as they are now. But the slow death of movie rental chain stores was already being slowly heralded by the rise of illegal torrenting, and the takeup of people using VPNs to access the United States’ Netflix catalogue, before it officially launched here in 2015.
“I find, as much as people come here to find the classic movies or to find something obscure that they can't get anywhere else, so many people are just, you know, renting something out that they know they could just watch on Netflix,” muses Kenny. “But they want to be part of a community, they want human interaction, they just want to be acknowledged as a human being and just to be seen. We're tribal creatures. Even the most introverted introverts still needs a little bit of human interaction.”
Photograph: Film Club/Manon Keus
“More movies get released every week, and I think culture can be overwhelming. So to put it all on a little shelf and make it sort of manageable and approachable, people seem to really like that.”
He can’t count the number of times over the past two years that customers have “half-seriously, jokingly, or dead seriously” said that the store is an essential service to them: “I've felt a strong responsibility to people's mental health. To be someone’s point of contact with humanity. If I'm the only person that someone actually speaks to in a given day or a week, then that's a responsibility on my end ...As much as it is a business and I do live off it, I also feel a certain obligation to the people who have helped this place survive.”
After just over a decade steering the store through highs and lows, including two lockdowns, Kenny says that Film Club is still a functioning, profitable business, but it is time for him to move on: “I've still been having fun here, I've still enjoyed being ‘the video store clerk’, but I've also just in the last few years, just felt that I'd sort of taken it as far as I could. I could feel my attention or my passion for it waning a little bit. And I think the store and the community really deserve someone who is excited about it. Perhaps someone with the passion and enthusiasm of someone who's discovering film for the first time.”
Photograph: Film Club/Manon Keus
The next owner could be an individual with a passion for film like Kenny, or it could be a team of people operating as a Co-Op, a system which Sydney is seeing more and more of in the wake of lockdowns.
As of October 11, after months of operating under a makeshift storefront model, Film Club is open again for in-store browsing. If a new custodian doesn’t put their hand up by the end of the year, the store will close when its lease ends in February.
Kenny adds: “As much as it strokes my ego to be ‘the video store guy’ and to be like ‘the last saviour’ and everything, it really is the community's store. It has been created and has been sustained by the patrons of the store and so my thanks and my gratefulness always goes out to them.”
You can follow Film Club on Facebook and Instagram and check out the website if you’d like to get in touch.