Shirkers

2018, 97 minutes, Digital
USA

Language: English

Director: Sandi Tan

Distributor: Netflix

Screening hosted by director Sandi Tan

An inspired labor of love for zine-making teens Sandi Tan, Jasmine Ng and Sophie Siddique, Shirkers was a Singapore-made 1992 cult classic—or it would have been, had the 16mm footage not been stolen by their enigmatic American collaborator Georges Cardona, who disappeared. More than two decades later, Tan, now a novelist in L.A., returns to the country of her youth and to the memories of a man who both enabled and thwarted her dreams. Magically, too, she returns to the film itself, revived in a way she never could have imagined.

“A knotty detective yarn, a funny valentine to Singapore and one of the year’s most ardent expressions of movie love, it tells a story of cinematic theft, and in the process, becomes an entrancing feat of cinematic reclamation.”
— Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times

“It sends you wondering at all the wild creativity and genius of young irrepressible women lost to time, held up or buried by the domineering egos of men.”
— Emily Yoshida, New York Magazine / Vulture

“An exemplary work of counter-lives and alternative histories, intimate self-portraiture and cultural reconstruction, hard-won empathy and painful reconciliation.”
— Richard Brody, The New Yorker

Part of the series CONTEMPORARY WOMEN FILMMAKERS and MAKING CINEMA MATTER IN BALTIMORE.

Join director Sandi Tan for a FREE masterclass April 6, 10am-1pm, at the Parkway.

MAKING CINEMA MATTER IN BALTIMORE is a FREE artist-led workshop and screening series featuring distinguished visiting filmmakers who connect their films and filmmaking to social, creative, or cultural issues in Baltimore. This project is presented in partnership with Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), Johns Hopkins University, Maryland Film Festival/Stavros Niarchos Foundation Parkway Theatre, and the Saul Zaentz Innovation Fund. This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Additional Images

Sandi Tan

Born in Singapore, Sandi published a cult zine called The Exploding Cat at 16 and at 22 became the film critic at The Straits Times, Singapore’s largest newspaper. Then she threw all that away to run off to film school at Columbia University. Her short films MOVEABLE FEAST and GOURMET BABY have played at over 100 film festivals including the New York Film Festival. She is the author of The Black Isle, an epic novel that re-imagines Singapore’s 20th century as a ghost story. She was a 2016 Sundance Documentary Film Program Fellow and a 2017 Sundance Creative Producing Fellow. Her film Shirkers made its world premiere at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival where she won a Directing award. She was named one of Variety’s “10 Documentary Filmmakers to Watch” of 2018 and one of Indiewire’s “20 Rising Female Directors of 2018.”