Here’s why you should pay attention to ‘Shirkers’, the Singapore road movie that won big at Sundance

Photo: Shirkers / Facebook
Photo: Shirkers / Facebook

Outside of the country’s small indie film enthusiast circle, the name Sandi Tan and her film Shirkers is probably unheard of. That’s a shame, because the Singapore-born filmmaker (and former Straits Times film critic) just won the directing award in World Cinema Documentary following her recent debut at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

Based on the glowing reviews of her film — a personal documentary 25 years in the making — the award will be the first of many for Tan in the months to come.

 

Movers, shakers, and shirkers

It’s hard to distinguish what exactly Shirkers is. It’s a ‘90s retrospect; it’s an uncompleted indie film; it’s a road movie; it’s a noir crime story; it’s a love letter to the old days of Singapore; it’s a documentary, it’s a coming-of-age tale.

The premise is this. In 1992, a young Singaporean teen by the name of Sandi Tan and her two friends made a lo-fi thriller called Shirkers — but right when it was about to enter post-production, her film mentor Georges vanished with all 70 cans of footage. The filmmaking trio parted ways to various countries after their friendship dissolved in the aftermath.

Twenty years later, the footage mysteriously resurfaced. The rediscovery sent Tan — now a Los Angeles-based novelist — into an international journey to reconnect with her lost collaborators. It’s one that explores the concepts of youth, friendship, adulthood and the art of indie filmmaking in the backdrop of ‘90s Singapore.

So far, Shirkers received warm critical acclaim when it was screened at the iconic Egyptian Theatre in Utah, and by the looks of reviews coming out from Sundance, Tan’s film deserves some serious attention from the Singaporean public.

Take a gander at some of the excerpts we found below:


The Guardian

“An unexpected delight, this documentary about Singapore’s only hipsters making one of its only independent films in the early 90s is a highlight of the Sundance programme. First-time director Sandi Tan revisits a time when she and a group of pretentious visionaries shot a feature-length film also called Shirkers, the story of an 18-year-old killer roaming the streets having adventures. The result is a joyous and funny recollection of a youth when anything felt possible – and it could be a big hit if it gets the wide distribution it deserves.”

“But this is so much more than a film about a film, it’s about young women breaking the rules set in a conservative country – the process of doing that was a lot more powerful than finishing the actual film.”

 

IndieWire

Shirkers is a documentary about the production of an uncompleted movie, but it doubles as an upgraded version of the missing project itself. As a punk teen in early-nineties Singapore, Sandi Tan wrote a feminist slasher movie for the ages, an exploitation road movie designed to ruminate on the energy of youth, creativity, and alienation. The director, a much older American high school instructor with dubious motives, stole the film canisters for unknown reasons and vanished into the mist; two decades later, Tan has completed a fascinating personal look at her quest to uncover his motives, resurrecting the significance of her original intentions in the process.”

“Whether it was a botched masterpiece or simply an idealistic young woman’s first stab at finding her creative voice, Tan can’t say. After shifting careers from production to criticism before finding her way back again, she has produced a remarkable statement on the formation of a creative identity across many years and life experiences. Whatever the original intentions of Shirkers, some two decades years later, she found out a way to complete it on her own terms.”

 

LA Times

“Filmmaker Sandi Tan made Singapore’s first road movie 25 years ago, then it disappeared. Literally. How and why the footage reappeared makes for a smart, idiosyncratic, one of a kind examination of the vicissitudes of cinema, and of life.”

 

The New Yorker

“The new Shirkers offers copious samples of the film that was shot in 1992, and it’s gloriously, gleefully idiosyncratic, a blend of punk energy and local documentation, a sort of antic reflection of Tan’s and her friends’ extremes of imagination and their sentimental attachment to their families, their friends, and their city. It’s raw and spare, colorful and filled with ingenious sight gags and bright touches of cheap costuming.”

“The loss to Singapore, and to the movie world, of the original Shirkers, as well as the sense of loss that has marked Tan and her friends’ life and work (despite their notable accomplishments), links Shirkers to (Bisbee ’17) as an exemplary work of counter-lives and alternative histories, intimate self-portraiture and cultural reconstruction, hard-won empathy and painful reconciliation.”

 

The Hollywood Reporter

“There’s no counting the creative projects begun in youth that have been abandoned, forgotten, scrapped. Sandi Tan’s bears the weird and painful distinction of having been stolen.”

“The Shirkers that Tan has made is a wry and wistful portrait of the artist as a young punk. Combining the 25-year-old material and new interviews with her filmmaking co-conspirators, it’s a cine-essay on movie love, a capsule autobiography and a lament for what might have been. In the annals of lost films, Tan’s original Shirkers may hold a special place, but in its long, long wake she’s fashioned a crime-of-the-heart investigation that has a gumshoe pulse and casts a hypnotic spell.”

 

Dork Shelf

“If released at the time the feature Shirkers would likely have been a mere blip in Singapore’s film history. Because of the strange road it took to be rediscovered, along with the wrappings of Tam’s stunning non-fiction approach, the true spirit of this collaboration is allowed to shine in ways far more luminous than would ever have been the case back when production began. It feels a bit like fate, as if Tan and her friend’s work needed to buried only to be unearthed when the time was right, when a dash of nostalgia and the self-critical aptitude gained through adulthood can properly situate this strange work.”

“Not since American Movie has there been a work that so wonderfully articulates and satirizes the beauty and foolishness of independent filmmaking. Shirkers speaks to any true lover of cinema, calling out the vagaries of youth while simultaneously calling attention to what truly drives the artistic pursuit. In every way this is a work that feels meant to be, and by the same measure it deserves to find as wide an audience as possible.”



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