Carefully restored. Lovingly packaged. Independently published. Every title we release is a declaration that the film deserves to be seen again—and held.
"Are you happy?" — A question that made an entire city answer back.
Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin walked into Paris in the summer of 1960 with a camera that could finally follow people as they moved, breathed, and told the truth. What came back was not a documentary in any prior sense of the word—it was a provocation, a sociological mirror, a film asking whether ordinary life could bear the weight of cinema's gaze.
Chronicle of a Summer introduced the concept of cinéma vérité to the world, though Rouch was careful to note that the camera always distorts, always performs. The subjects knew they were being filmed. That was the point.
"The camera doesn't catch life as it is—it catches the life people perform for the camera. That performance is the truth."
Our restoration, supervised from the original 16mm negatives held at the Cinémathèque française, presents the film with a textural fidelity that previous editions could not achieve. This is not a polished film—its grain is its honesty.
Read the Full Essay →"We are not a streaming service. We are not a rental. We are a commitment—to the film, to its makers, to the person who will keep it on their shelf and return to it ten years from now."
VideoCrook began not in a film school or a distribution office, but in a bedroom in Tulsa, Oklahoma — where an 18-year-old named Alexander Price couldn't find a proper release of the films he cared most about.
Price had grown up watching films that felt like contraband — passed around on burned DVDs, discovered through library VHS copies going fuzzy at the edges. When he realized that some of the greatest films ever made had no proper home edition, no booklet, no care taken in their presentation, he decided someone had to do it.
The first VideoCrook release — a modest pressing of 200 copies of Djibril Diop Mambéty's Badou Boy — sold out in three days, entirely by word of mouth. Six years and forty-seven titles later, VideoCrook remains independently owned, debt-free, and operated from Tulsa by the same person who started it, still convinced that a film held in your hands is a film properly loved.