Campaign aims to save hundreds of hard-to-find films as one of Vancouver Island's last video stores closes

That's a wrap on Pic-A-Flic Video.

After 40 years serving customers in Victoria, one of the last standing video rental spots on Vancouver Island is closing its doors forever this fall, leaving more than 25,000 films without a home.

"It hasn't been profitable in years and years and years," said owner Kent Bendall in an interview on CBC's On The Island.

While streaming behemoths like Netflix and Amazon may have killed the video store, Bendall says many of his films can't be found online and, soon after he broke the news this week that he will shut the shop in September, Pic-A-Flic patrons launched a campaign to find a new home for Bendall's collection.

A petition has been started this week calling on the Greater Victoria Library and the University of Victoria to purchase the store's entire inventory. As of Thursday morning, the petition has over 1,000 signatures.

Signatory Emrys Damon Miller has been renting VHS tapes from the shop for over 30 years. His love affair with the store began as a teenager, when he would drive over an hour from Metchosin, B.C., to rent stacks of tapes for viewing parties with friends. 

At that time there were plenty of video stores to choose from, but Miller would always head to Pic-A-Flic because of its diverse selection.

That includes more than 500 cult classics, hundreds of French films, dozens of titles from the Czech Republic, flicks from Iceland and about 100 Russian and Ukrainian films dating back to the 1920s.

"If we think about cinema encouraging empathy, that we really get to inhabit the spaces and needs of diverse characters and expand our ideas of the world, it's really unique compared to a small collection of Hollywood films," said Miller, speaking on CBC's All Points West.

Miller became close with the staff after visiting the store for so many years. He says the reason it stayed open for so long while others folded is a testament to its friendly, knowledgeable employees and the community of customers that appreciated walking the aisles looking for rare flicks as opposed to relying on streaming suggestions.

"You are browsing through a hundred years of cinema and TV from around the globe ... it's a very different experience to an algorithm just showing you what's hot and trending," said Miller.

Bendall, who took over the store seven years ago, said he just can't keep the business financially afloat anymore.

"It's a great job. It just doesn't pay the bills," he lamented.

Since time can't be kind to rewind to when video stores were central to family entertainment, Bendall is hopeful his collection can be kept together wherever it ends up.

"I'd love to keep the collection together, just so it's accessible to people. But if nobody steps up to the plate, at the end of summer there will just be a big sale," he said.

The push to get a library or university to purchase such a collection is not unprecedented.

In 2016, Halifax Public Libraries and Dalhousie University purchased 5,500 titles from Video Difference, a 34-year-old shop in Halifax. A thousand of those went into the university's collection and were made available to the public and the rest went into the library system.

All of Pic-A-Flic's titles will remain available for rent until the store, located at 1519 Pandora Ave., closes in September.