Past Season

Kmart Confidential
(DOCUMENTARY, 10 minutes, 43 seconds)

This poignant film charts filmmaker Elena Oxman’s personal relationship with Kmart throughout her lifetime. From the early “indignities” of having to wear Kmart clothes as a kid and her teenage embrace of Kmart as a 24-hour playground, to her more recent feelings of nostalgia and relief as the underdog of American big box retailing teeters on the edge of oblivion, Kmart Confidential is a bittersweet tribute to the struggling superstore.

Filmmaker Profile: Elena Oxman

Filmmaker Elena Oxman started making films while at Yale University. She received what she characterizes as her “real film education” as an Emerging Artist Fellow at the Yale Digital Media Center for the Arts where she made several documentaries with friend, Elihu Rubin.  Oxman and Rubin went on to found the documentary production company, American Beat, (http://www.americanbeat.org), which continues to operate in New Haven, CT.

Local Angles

• Elena Oxman moved to Carrboro, NC, from New Haven, CT, in fall 2002 to pursue a Ph.D in English literature at UNC-Chapel Hill. She shot Kmart Confidential in Connecticut before leaving for school, and edited it last fall from her new home in Carrboro. 

• Kmart Confidential premiered at the Ms. Film Festival in Durham, NC, in the spring of 2003, and was screened at the Hi Mom! Festival in Carrboro.