Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Shirkers’ On Netflix, A Documentary About The Early ‘90s Art Scene In Singapore And A Mysterious Director

Documentaries about the making of movies are always fascinating. But with Shirkers, it’s not as much about making a movie but it’s about what happened afterwards, when the movie’s mysterious director disappeared and took all the shot film with him. Read on about this unique documentary…

SHIRKERS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: In 1993, three teens in Singapore — Sandi Tan, Jasmine Ng and Sophie Siddique — made a movie called Shirkers. It was to be nothing like anything the notoriously uptight and image-conscious country had seen to that point, and the three teens were just the ones to make it. Sandi Tan spent her teen years writing for Singapore’s alternative music magazine and then making her own zine, called The Exploding Cat. They all figured they could pull it off, especially after taking a filmmaking class with a mysterious teacher named Georges Cardona.

The movie was getting buzz from the local alternative press even while it was being shot, and Georges was getting increasingly erratic while directing the film (it was a skeleton crew, with Sophie being the executive producer and Jasmine being the DP). But then, right after principal photography wrapped and editing was to begin, Georges disappeared, along with all the reels of film they shot.

Tan takes us through the process of shooting the film and the relationship she had with Ng, Siddique and Cardona. In the present day, Tan tries to piece together where Cardona, who died in the early 2010s, went after absconding with the reels, and just who he was. Through interviews with people he knew and worked with, Tan finds out that Cardona was a jealous man who often sabotaged projects he helped on for fear his proteges would achieve more than he would. She also liberally sprinkles in footage from the reels, which were discovered in perfect shape after Cardona died, albeit without the sound recordings included.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: This is a unique documentary to say the least. It could combine a making-of film like Hearts of Darkness with a Serial-esque true crime mystery.

Performance Worth Watching: Jasmine Ng, the only one of the three friends who still directs films, seems to have a love-hate-love relationship with Tan, and you can tell from the back and forth she gives her old friend while Tan interviews her in the present day. Her straightforward manner was pretty refreshing, for reasons we’ll explain later.

Memorable Dialogue: Tan talks to Cardona’s widow, and we hear on the audio recording that he said his mother was French. When Tan asked if she ever met his mother, she says “I couldn’t speak to her, she only spoke Spanish.”

Single Best Shot: Somehow, the crew found the largest dog in Singapore, and managed to shoot him walking in a supermarket. Let’s just say this was guerrilla filmmaking at its best.

Sex and Skin: Not that kind of film.

Our Take: About halfway through the documentary Shirkers, we were wondering when Sandi Tan was going to stop talking about what an avant-garde film they were making and actually talk about Cardona’s theft and disappearance. After all, that’s the crux of the film: Who was Cardona, how did he get these girls (well, mostly Tan… Ng and Siddique weren’t quite as enamored with him) to trust him to direct the film, and why this grown man even associated so closely with teenagers to begin with.

But halfway through the film, we were still hearing about the shoot and how wonderful and artsy the movie Shirkers was going to be. Listen, we get it; this would have been revolutionary in the Singaporean art scene in the early ’90s, an era when the government banned chewing gum and famously caned an American student for stealing street signs. But, let’s face it: it was a group of kids who thought they were misunderstood making a movie that looked about as good as a grainy student film. The fact that a now 40-something Tan, who reviewed movies for awhile but is now a novelist, looks back and doesn’t think that it was more than just three crazy kids thinking they can do it all is silly.

We wanted to hear more about Cardona. And perhaps Tan expected to make the movie more about him. But the details of his life that she found out were sketchy at best, which likely meant that she had to fill time with reminiscences of the movie’s production and a lot of back-patting. An examination of Singapore in the early ’90s would have been a better through-line for the film, given that the glimpses we got were fascinating.

Our Call: STREAM IT. You may have to struggle through the middle part of the film, and you might roll your eyes at how much Tan and her friends still seem to have blinders about the quality of the movie they made a quarter-century ago. But it’s worth it to get a glimpse of the art scene in a country not many Americans know much about, even today.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Watch Shirkers on Netflix