The Last Video Store
Videodrom is in crisis. The video rental store in Berlin’s Kreuzberg has 35,000 films in its catalog—the biggest in Germany—and €20,000 in debt that grows every month. Rental numbers have collapsed. The owner, Karsten Rodemann (who calls himself Graf Haufen), watches the math turn impossible. Summer’s coming, traditionally dead season for places like this, and he’s out of reserves.
But the debt is just a number. The actual problem is bigger. When Netflix or Criterion or whoever decides a film isn’t worth the licensing cost, isn’t trendy enough, doesn’t serve the algorithm’s current preference—it disappears. One day it’s there. The next, nothing. Deleted. Unless you kept the DVD, unless you knew someone with a copy, unless there’s still a physical archive somewhere, that film becomes effectively inaccessible. Not lost. Just gone from the world as anyone could reasonably get to it.
What made Videodrom different was exactly what made it unsustainable. Rodemann ran the place on the logic that culture was worth preserving even when there wasn’t money in it. You could find films there that streaming services had already written off, forgotten about, determined weren’t profitable to keep circulating. 35,000 reasons to think differently about what got to survive.
The thing that kills me is how inevitable the collapse feels. Streaming was always going to be cheaper and easier than renting DVDs. The margins were always going to get worse. Once enough people stop renting, the economics just don’t work—rent goes up, demand goes down, and every independent video store hits the same wall eventually. Berlin’s full of that story right now. Shops closing. Chains replacing whatever was independent. The city becoming something more efficient and less interesting.
Videodrom is probably done. Maybe some nostalgia moment buys it time. Maybe the owner keeps scrapping it out. But the math underneath doesn’t change. What gets to me is thinking about what doesn’t get preserved when places like this close down. There are films only available there now. Not because they’re rare or obscure—some are pretty standard—but because the streaming services delisted them, or the licensing is tangled, or they’re just not profitable to keep in circulation anymore. Those films exist in one physical location in Berlin, and when that location closes, they become a lot harder to see.
There’s something about walking into a store and talking to someone who’s been watching films for decades that doesn’t have an algorithm equivalent. Asking what to watch and actually getting taste, context, a reason to take a risk on something you wouldn’t have clicked on alone. That’s gone when the store closes. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe that’s just nostalgia for a way of living that wasn’t that great in the first place. But I’m not sure.