Shirkers

For the economics concept, see shirking.

Shirkers is a 2018 British-American documentary film by Singapore-born filmmaker Sandi Tan about the making of an independent thriller featuring a teenage assassin set in Singapore.^[1] It premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival in January and won the World Cinema Documentary Directing Award, making her the second Singapore-born filmmaker after Kirsten Tan (Pop Aye, 2017) to win an award at the festival.^[2][3][4] It was also nominated for the Gotham Independent Film Award for Best Documentary.^[5]

Shirkers
Directed by	Sandi Tan
Written by	Sandi Tan
Produced by	Sandi Tan Jessica Levin Maya Rudolph
Cinematography	Iris Ng
Edited by	Lucas Celler Sandi Tan Kimberley Hassett
Music by	Ishai Adar
Distributed by	Netflix
Release date	January 2018 (2018-01) (Sundance)
Running time	96 minutes
Countries	Singapore United States United Kingdom

Shirkers was released on October 26, 2018, on Netflix.^[6]

Synopsis

In the summer of 1992, 19-year-old Sandi Tan, alongside friends Jasmine Ng and Sophia Siddique, as well as film teacher and mentor Georges Cardona, shot the independent film Shirkers, which would have made it Singapore's first road movie. The footage showed lots of promise and big things were expected of the finished result.^[7] After wrapping, Tan, Ng, and Siddique left the footage with Cardona as the trio went to study abroad for college. However, Cardona disappeared with the footage and the trio never saw him again; Tan did receive two brief, inconsequential taped messages via snail mail.^[8]

On September 11, 2011, four years after Cardona's death in 2007, Cardona's ex-wife emailed Tan (who by now was a novelist living in Los Angeles),^[9] informing her that she was in possession of the footage for Shirkers, minus the audio tracks. In the proceeding years, Tan decided to digitize the footage and use it to make something new: a documentary about the process of creating, and then losing, the original 1992 film.^[10]

Interviews were conducted in 2015 with Tan's friends, people involved with the making of Shirkers, and people who knew Cardona. The interviewees were Sophia Siddique Harvey, Jasmine Ng, Sharon Siddique, Philip Cheah, Ben Harrison, Foo Fung Liang, Pohshon Choy, Tay Yek Keak, Grace Dane Mazur, Stephen Tyler, and Georges Cardona's ex-wife.

Georges Cardona

Around 1976 in New Orleans, Georges Cardona,^[11] a John F. Kennedy High School attendee, photography mentor to David Duke, and Vietnam War veteran,^[12] opened Lighthouse Media Center (a franchisee of Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Super-8 Sound, a retrofitter of Beaulieu Super 8 film cameras).^[13][14] Cardona was the cinematographer for some of David Duke's electoral campaign commercials and, in New Orleans in 1988, for Stephen Tyler's The Last Slumber Party.^[15]

Reception

Critical reception

On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 99% based on 70 reviews, with an average rating of 8.3/10. The site's consensus reads: "Shirkers uses one woman's interrogation of a pivotal personal disappointment to offer affecting observations on creativity, lost opportunity, and coming to terms with the past."^[16] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 88 out of 100 based on 20 critics, indicating "universal acclaim"; it is labeled as a "Metacritic must-see".^[17]

Citing the film as one of his favorites at Sundance, Nick Allen of RogerEbert.com wrote a rave review for Shirkers, saying that "Tan presents her multifaceted life story—vibrant, unbelievable, and full of such incredible women—as a dazzling tapestry that’s unlike many narrative or documentary films."^[18]

Accolades

Award	Date of ceremony	Category	Recipient(s)	Result	Ref.
Alliance of Women Film Journalists Awards	January 10, 2019	Best Documentary	Sandi Tan	Nominated	[19]
Austin Film Critics Association Awards	January 18, 2019	Best Documentary	Shirkers	Nominated	[20]
Cinema Eye Honors	January 10, 2019	Outstanding Achievement in a Debut Feature Film	Sandi Tan	Nominated	[21]
		Outstanding Achievement in Direction	Sandi Tan	Nominated
		Outstanding Achievement in Original Music Score	Ishai Adar	Won
		Outstanding Achievement in Graphic Design or Animation	Sandi Tan and Lucas Celler	Won
		Audience Choice Prize	Sandi Tan	Nominated
		The Unforgettables	Georges Cardona, Sophia Siddique Harvey, Jasmine Kin Kia Ng, and Sandi Tan	Won
Dorian Awards	January 12, 2019	Documentary of the Year	Shirkers	Nominated	[22]
Florida Film Critics Circle Awards	December 21, 2018	Best Documentary Film	Shirkers	Won	[23]
Golden Reel Awards	February 17, 2019	Outstanding Achievement in Sound Editing – Feature Documentary	Lawrence Everson and Cindy Takehara Ferruccio	Nominated	[24]
Gotham Independent Film Awards	November 26, 2018	Best Documentary	Shirkers	Nominated	[25]
		Audience Award	Shirkers	Nominated
Independent Spirit Awards	February 23, 2019	Best Documentary Feature	Sandi Tan, Jessica Levin, and Maya E. Rudolph	Nominated	[26]
International Cinephile Society Awards	February 3, 2019	Best Documentary	Shirkers	Nominated	[27]
Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards	December 9, 2018	Best Documentary/Nonfiction Film	Shirkers	Won	[28]
National Society of Film Critics Awards	January 5, 2019	Best Non-Fiction Film	Shirkers	Runner-up	[29]
Online Film Critics Society Awards	January 2, 2019	Best Documentary Film	Shirkers	Nominated	[30]
Peabody Awards	May 18, 2019	Documentary	Shirkers	Nominated	[31]
Philadelphia Film Festival Awards	October 28, 2018	Best Documentary Feature	Shirkers	Won	[32][33]
San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle Awards	December 9, 2018	Best Documentary	Shirkers	Nominated	[34]
Seattle Film Critics Society Awards	December 17, 2018	Best Documentary Feature	Sandi Tan	Nominated	[35]
Sundance Film Festival	January 27, 2019	World Cinema Documentary Directing Award	Sandi Tan	Won	[36]
Women Film Critics Circle Awards	December 11, 2018	Best Documentary by or About Women	Shirkers	Runner-up	[37]

See also

• Cinema of Singapore
• Guerrilla filmmaking
• Cinephilia