Val is a 2021 American documentary built almost entirely from one actor's private archive: four decades of tape that Val Kilmer shot himself, now shaped by directors Leo Scott and Ting Poo into a portrait of a working life in Hollywood.
What is Val about?
Long before phone cameras made self-documentation ordinary, Val Kilmer was pointing a lens at his own days. The material spans 16mm home movies made with his brothers, backstage and on-set footage from the years of Top Gun, The Doors, Tombstone and Batman Forever, and thousands of hours of video that had never been seen publicly. Scott and Poo cut through that mountain of tape to follow an actor who was often described as difficult or misunderstood, letting the footage carry the argument rather than a parade of talking heads. The result moves between comedy and something rawer, less a career recap than a study of what it costs to keep making things.
About the cast
Kilmer is the centre of every frame, whether as the young performer in his own recordings or as the man looking back on them. Jack Kilmer also appears. Because so much of the running time is archival, familiar faces from those productions surface as well, among them Kevin Bacon, Sean Penn, Marlon Brando, David Thewlis, Kurt Russell and Tom Cruise, glimpsed in material that was shot while the cameras of the studio were not rolling.
Context & significance
Actor documentaries usually rely on interviews conducted years after the fact. Val takes a different route, because its subject had been building the archive in real time, which gives the film a texture closer to a diary than a retrospective. Released in 2021 and listed here under both Biography and Documentary, the film runs a little under two hours and stands as an unusual entry in the genre precisely because the subject controlled the camera for most of his life.
Watching Val on Ktime
Val is available to stream on K-Time with a free account login. The listing does not currently carry a Persian dub or Persian subtitles, so it suits viewers comfortable with the original English audio. The K-Time interface itself is fully available in Farsi for members of the Iranian diaspora who prefer to browse in Persian.