Film Review: ‘Shirkers’

There’s an alternate universe where Sandi Tan, a movie-crazy teenager from Singapore, burst onto the scene with her two young collaborators in 1992, forging an independent film movement in a country where none had existed.

That dream ended when the mysterious director they were working with absconded with 70 16mm film canisters, which only recently surfaced — albeit without the accompanying sound recordings — in the wake of his death.

Though the original film, a precocious answer to “Breathless,” has been lost, Tan has ingeniously refashioned the old footage into “Shirkers,” a cinematic memoir of growing up weird in Singapore and how a strange, incomplete production altered the trajectory of her life.

After bowing at Sundance, where it picked up a well-deserved director award in the World Cinema Documentary competition, the film was bought by Netflix shortly before appearing in the True/False Film Festival and should reside comfortably on the service’s formidable roster of offbeat nonfiction.

Read full article