RAINBOW VIDEO- Jessie Scott MDFF &F Project Cinema mini documentary film festival

Rainbow Video by Jessie Scott

Mozart Hall:23rd July 2025 @ 7:30pm:

Inspired by Tom Roston’s oral history I Lost It at the Video Store, this playful, feature-length documentary uses a deep local focus to show how VHS changed art forever. As the video shop era fades into obscurity, Rainbow Video delves into the eclectic personal collections and practices of some of Melbourne’s most renowned contemporary media artists. Through lively interviews and site studies of legendary, now-defunct video shops, Rainbow Video uncovers a secret history of a brief but impactful era.

For those who grew up in the 1980s, we were the video generation, born into the video shop era, our youth passing along with it. While it was a mass pop-cultural phenomenon, artists, filmmakers, and eccentrics of all kinds flocked to these shops on Friday nights, worked in them, or wished they did.

Artists and programmers such as Philip Brophy, Ian Haig, Cassandra Tytler, Xanthe Dobbie, Jean Lizza, Diego Ramirez, and Spiro Economopoulos explore their own libraries and back catalogs, discussing how they used video shops: as a direct source of material, an informal and accessible art school, and a social space to trade cultural capital. Against a backdrop of 30 years of constantly shifting technology, Rainbow Video explores the twin history of indie video shops and libraries in Melbourne and the underground artists who used them, proving that video shops were not just a footnote in the history of film distribution but a crucial period of transition whose impacts endure