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Open thread: do you still use DVDs or videos? Has your collection survived?

<span>Photograph: Henry Iddon/Alamy</span>
Photograph: Henry Iddon/Alamy

As Sydney’s ‘last, best’ video shop closes, what’s the future for physical media in Australia, and for the communities who collect them?

  • We’ve love to hear about your film collections, big or small. Share them in the comments below


In 2015, between dusty rows of shelves in a small op-shop somewhere in suburban Sydney, I made a vow to myself: whenever I spotted a copy of Dude, Where’s My Car? on DVD, I would have to buy it.

There was no deeper thought behind the mission. To this day I have not even watched the movie. But something about its cover – Ashton Kutcher, wide-eyed, hamming into the camera; the extremely Y2K gradient; the charmingly chunky letters spelling out its title – felt right. It felt soothing.

So clutching a very faded DVD – which had probably been there since its 2001 release – I made my way to the counter and sheepishly handed over a $5 note.

Related: ‘You can’t close’: Melbourne’s last video store determined to stay open in streaming era

Since then, I have not amassed a particularly impressive collection of Dude, Where’s My Car? DVDs (unless you count 15 as impressive, in which case you would be very generous). But still, there is something sentimental about each copy – the one I got from a flea market on holidays, or the time I was fleeced out of $20 by an expedient vendor. I believe I was brainwashed by Ashton’s thousand-yard stare.

My quest may be singular and foolhardy, but I am not alone in the sentimentality – at least if the outpouring of tributes last month for Sydney’s Film Club is anything to go by. Based in Darlinghurst, the “last, best” video store in the city – as it described itself – had survived the mass extinction of its bigger peers for a decade, only to be scuppered by … well, the last two years.

Over the course of a month, Film Club slowly cleared out, selling – then giving away – its 25,000-strong disk collection.

Comments under the announcement – from longtime physical media aficionados to newer adopters – mourned the loss of a Sydney institution. Heartbreak was the word. “It was such a great pleasure engaging with physical film again,” wrote one user.

“While Film Club may be gone … a small piece of it will reside on the shelves of collectors,” went another ode in the University of Sydney’s student newspaper Honi Soit.

DVD shops are few and far between, but the ones remaining have become glimmers of hope for their community, providing copies of films otherwise lost to changing times and tastes. Lost with them are the rare titbits of director’s commentary, behind-the-scenes footage, and – fine – blooper reels, not to mention the more niche films which never made it on to streaming in the first place.

“If you close, there are things we won’t have access to,” said one regular to Picture Search, Melbourne’s last video shop.

Meanwhile, a tiny brick-and-mortar in central Queensland called Fox Video has beaten the odds, still standing as an anachronism from the 90s. “It’s not so much a video store any more,” said the owner in an ABC interview. “It’s like sharing your collection with the world.”

  • If you’ve got your own physical film collection to share – whether it’s 15 copies of a dated stoner comedy or a vast library of arthouse classics – we’d love to hear about it in the comments below. Tell us about your DVD/Blu-ray/VHS collection and why it’s still going strong in the face of streaming, as well as any communities that share your pastime.