Shirkers

In the summer of 1992, 19-year-old Sandi Tan, alongside friends Jasmine Ng and Sophia Siddique, as well as film teacher and mentor Georges Cardona, shot the independent film Shirkers, which would have made it Singapore's first road movie. The footage showed lots of promise and big things were expected of the finished result.^[7] After wrapping, Tan, Ng, and Siddique left the footage with Cardona as the trio went to study abroad for college. However, Cardona disappeared with the footage and the trio never saw him again; Tan did receive two brief, inconsequential taped messages via snail mail.^[8]

On September 11, 2011, four years after Cardona's death in 2007, Cardona's ex-wife emailed Tan (who by now was a novelist living in Los Angeles),^[9] informing her that she was in possession of the footage for Shirkers, minus the audio tracks. In the proceeding years, Tan decided to digitize the footage and use it to make something new: a documentary about the process of creating, and then losing, the original 1992 film.^[10]

Interviews were conducted in 2015 with Tan's friends, people involved with the making of Shirkers, and people who knew Cardona. The interviewees were Sophia Siddique Harvey, Jasmine Ng, Sharon Siddique, Philip Cheah, Ben Harrison, Foo Fung Liang, Pohshon Choy, Tay Yek Keak, Grace Dane Mazur, Stephen Tyler, and Georges Cardona's ex-wife.

Around 1976 in New Orleans, Georges Cardona,^[11] a John F. Kennedy High School attendee, photography mentor to David Duke, and Vietnam War veteran,^[12] opened Lighthouse Media Center (a franchisee of Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Super-8 Sound, a retrofitter of Beaulieu Super 8 film cameras).^[13][14] Cardona was the cinematographer for some of David Duke's electoral campaign commercials and, in New Orleans in 1988, for Stephen Tyler's The Last Slumber Party.^[15]

On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 99% based on 70 reviews, with an average rating of 8.3/10. The site's consensus reads: "Shirkers uses one woman's interrogation of a pivotal personal disappointment to offer affecting observations on creativity, lost opportunity, and coming to terms with the past."^[16] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 88 out of 100 based on 20 critics, indicating "universal acclaim"; it is labeled as a "Metacritic must-see".^[17]

Citing the film as one of his favorites at Sundance, Nick Allen of RogerEbert.com wrote a rave review for Shirkers, saying that "Tan presents her multifaceted life story—vibrant, unbelievable, and full of such incredible women—as a dazzling tapestry that’s unlike many narrative or documentary films."^[18]

• Cinema of Singapore
• Guerrilla filmmaking
• Cinephilia

• Shirkers at IMDb
• Rolling Stone review of the film
• Christian Science Monitor review of the documentary film