What a view | 90s Singapore brought to life in Shirkers: Sundance prize winning Netflix documentary
- When director Georges Cardona made off with the footage from Sandi Tan’s debut feature in 1992, he unwittingly created a time capsule of a now unrecognisable Lion City, which Tan has used to craft a critically acclaimed film
In Shirkers, now playing on Netflix, teenage film nerd and studious-looking rebel Sandi Tan takes a film-production class and decides, along with two friends, to make a road movie (albeit one without much mileage) in her native Singapore. The year is 1992 and she enlists class tutor, Colombian-American Georges Cardona, as director, a Walter Mitty-type fantasist who encourages the girls to sink their savings into their creation – then absconds with all the footage, never to be seen again.
Twenty years later, unimaginably, Cardona’s widow returns all 70 canisters of the film, which, resurrected by digitisation, becomes the basis of a Sundance prize-winning documentary – ostensibly about the making of the original and its mysterious disappearance, but fundamentally, a backward gaze into early 1990s Singapore and a now unrecognisable life.
So, what of this unlikely scion, written, directed and produced by Tan (with associate producer credits for her two old friends, now talking heads)?
Extensive cuts from the original – paired with a 2017 voice-over and interviews with the 90s cast and crew, as well as family and former friends of the creepy Cardona, who died in 2007 – present a drowsy, pastel-coloured city state of shophouses, questionable fashion, dweeby hairstyles, boxy vehicles and lonely roads.
Tan the teenager and scriptwriter stars as jokey serial killer “S” in the surreal meditations of an artist clearly straining at the physical and psychological limits of home. It is not just a “sweaty little island” of quaint buildings and odd cars we are experiencing – it is a snow dome of forgotten attitudes.
Today, Tan remains bewildered by Cardona’s bizarre behaviour and mournful for the film that never was, but now is … sort of. Yet it’s difficult to dodge the feeling that, for all his deviousness, tall tales and spurious claims of film-industry credibility, Cardona did Tan an accidental favour by making Shirkers an inadvertent time capsule.