# Shirkers

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. 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. It was also nominated for the Gotham Independent Film Award for Best Documentary.
Shirkers was released on October 26, 2018, on Netflix.

## 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. 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.
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), 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.
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, a John F. Kennedy High School attendee, photography mentor to David Duke, and Vietnam War veteran, opened Lighthouse Media Center (a franchisee of Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Super-8 Sound, a retrofitter of Beaulieu Super 8 film cameras). 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.

## 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." 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".
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."

### Accolades

| Award | Date of ceremony | Category | Recipient(s) | Result |
| Alliance of Women Film Journalists Awards | January 10, 2019 | Best Documentary | Sandi Tan | Nominated |
| Austin Film Critics Association Awards | January 18, 2019 | Best Documentary | Shirkers | Nominated |
| Cinema Eye Honors | January 10, 2019 | Outstanding Achievement in a Debut Feature Film | Sandi Tan | Nominated |
| Cinema Eye Honors | January 10, 2019 | Outstanding Achievement in Direction | Sandi Tan | Nominated |
| Cinema Eye Honors | January 10, 2019 | Outstanding Achievement in Original Music Score | Ishai Adar | Won |
| Cinema Eye Honors | January 10, 2019 | Outstanding Achievement in Graphic Design or Animation | Sandi Tan and Lucas Celler | Won |
| Cinema Eye Honors | January 10, 2019 | Audience Choice Prize | Sandi Tan | Nominated |
| Cinema Eye Honors | January 10, 2019 | 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 |
| Florida Film Critics Circle Awards | December 21, 2018 | Best Documentary Film | Shirkers | Won |
| Golden Reel Awards | February 17, 2019 | Outstanding Achievement in Sound Editing – Feature Documentary | Lawrence Everson and Cindy Takehara Ferruccio | Nominated |
| Gotham Independent Film Awards | November 26, 2018 | Best Documentary | Shirkers | Nominated |
| Gotham Independent Film Awards | November 26, 2018 | Audience Award | Shirkers | Nominated |
| Independent Spirit Awards | February 23, 2019 | Best Documentary Feature | Sandi Tan, Jessica Levin, and Maya E. Rudolph | Nominated |
| International Cinephile Society Awards | February 3, 2019 | Best Documentary | Shirkers | Nominated |
| Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards | December 9, 2018 | Best Documentary/Nonfiction Film | Shirkers | Won |
| National Society of Film Critics Awards | January 5, 2019 | Best Non-Fiction Film | Shirkers | Runner-up |
| Online Film Critics Society Awards | January 2, 2019 | Best Documentary Film | Shirkers | Nominated |
| Peabody Awards | May 18, 2019 | Documentary | Shirkers | Nominated |
| Philadelphia Film Festival Awards | October 28, 2018 | Best Documentary Feature | Shirkers | Won |
| San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle Awards | December 9, 2018 | Best Documentary | Shirkers | Nominated |
| Seattle Film Critics Society Awards | December 17, 2018 | Best Documentary Feature | Sandi Tan | Nominated |
| Sundance Film Festival | January 27, 2019 | World Cinema Documentary Directing Award | Sandi Tan | Won |
| Women Film Critics Circle Awards | December 11, 2018 | Best Documentary by or About Women | Shirkers | Runner-up |