Making a film is incredibly difficult. For most, it’s a labor of love and not a financially viable endeavor, which is exactly what “Shirkers” was to Sandi Tan. Growing up in Singapore and loving things that were seen as taboo (punk music, strange world cinema, coordinating with her cousin in Florida to bootleg a copy of “Blue Velvet”), she wrote her own avant-garde screenplay at age nineteen about a serial killer named “S,” who she would play. Under her American mentor Georges Cardona, and along with her best friend Jasmine Ng, they would complete their underground feature and wait for Georges to update them on the post-production process.
Except there would be no post-production process. Georges would disappear from the face of the Earth for over twenty years.
“Shirkers” is a documentary with a very full mind and an even fuller heart. At once, it’s deeply cinematic and a love letter to renegade cinema. The film is largely populated with footage from the lost film, which truly is a boundary pusher in Tan’s home country that looked to upset the status quo. It also serves as a terrific piece of investigative journalism and examines the ghosts of the past and how to lay them to rest. Imagine pouring your heart, soul, and money into a project, ultimately to have the project never see the light of day. Tan eventually believed she had left “Shirkers” behind until she started seeing shades of the film in “Rushmore” and “Ghost World.”
Essentially divided into two parts, the first portion details the making of the film and the second centers on the return of the footage, after Tan gets a call in 2011 that Georges had passed away and had preserved the film negatives in New Orleans. The film’s latter portion becomes a journey into the psyche of a man who created a legend in his mind, maybe out of insecurity, or maybe out of jealousy (he often told Sandi he was the inspiration for James Spader’s character in “sex, lies, and videotape,” and we come to find out that he had another protege who got a job working on that film).
There’s almost enough material in the ghost of Georges’ past that Tan could have made this into a documentary miniseries. But as a strong storyteller, Tan doesn’t belabor the point or use the documentary equivalent of “plotblocking” to conceal the information. While it would be exciting to hear and see more of this, Tan streamlines the story and focuses largely on the production of the film, and the fallout, with only snippets here and there about where she is in her career as well as her close friends.
Ultimately, “Shirkers” is a film that should be experienced more than explained. That sounds like a cop out, but it’s an inspiring documentary about the process of filmmaking, the love of outsider art, but also a cautionary tale about trust and shadiness in the filmmaking world (something that almost derailed another film showed at NBFF). It’s a funny, strange, tragic, and powerful story, and one of the ultimate “this is so crazy that you won’t believe it’s true stories,” but done so with heart and soul, the same amount of heart and soul that Tan poured into her passion project at nineteen. [A-]