Shirkers 2018

Overview

Shirkers is a 2018 British-American documentary film directed by Singapore-born filmmaker Sandi Tan. The film explores the history of an independent thriller about a teenage assassin that Tan and her friends began producing in Singapore in 1992. During the production, Tan worked with an enigmatic American mentor named Georges, who eventually vanished with all of the 16mm footage. Twenty years later, the recovered film footage prompted Tan, who is now a novelist based in Los Angeles, to embark on a personal odyssey to investigate the events surrounding the project and search for the footprints of her former mentor. The documentary features appearances by Jasmine Kin Kia Ng, Philip Cheah, Sophia Siddique Harvey, and Sharon Siddique. Shirkers premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival in January, where it received the World Cinema Documentary Directing Award. The film has been described as a mystery regarding the making of an independent road movie that remained unfinished for over two decades.