SHIRKERS
Documentary Feature | 96 minutes

HIFF 2018

 World Cinema Documentary

Directed by
Sandi Tan

Produced by
Jessica Levin, Maya Rudolph, Sandi Tan

Written by
Sandi Tan

2018 | English | USA

Spending her days seeking refuge in zines, bootlegs, and American independent cinema, teenager Sandi Tan found herself among the first generation of Singapore’s burgeoning counterculture movement when she began working on her DIY-labor of love film SHIRKERS in the early 90s. But Sandi and her co-conspirators’ dreams of beginning a new film movement were crushed when Georges, her mysterious American mentor, disappeared with the entirety of the footage without warning. Two decades later, Tan and her collaborators return to the footage they lost in order to grapple with the movement their optimism inspired—and the man who tore it away from them—in this singular look at one artist’s attempt to reckon with the past.