Shirkers no more: three trailblazing women stake their claim on Singapore’s film legacy
- A new documentary about an ill-fated film project recognises three young filmmakers for their rightful impact on Singaporean cinema
The history of Singapore cinema has been rewritten by two films from two eras going by the same title: Shirkers.
The tumultuous and abortive production of the first film, a surrealist fiction written by Sandi Tan and shot in 1992, is chronicled defiantly in the second, a documentary which earned Tan a Best Director award at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year.
But before the success of its second manifestation, the original Shirkers was born out of the efforts of three pioneering film students, then derailed for decades by a sociopathic director who made off with all the film’s footage.
BACKSTORY
In 1991, three 18-year-old Singaporeans, Tan, Jasmine Ng and Sophia Siddique, signed up for a three-month filmmaking course at a newly opened arts incubator called The Substation.
The course was a novelty at the time, as Singapore’s film industry had grown moribund since the heyday of the 1950s and 1960s, when the Hong Kong conglomerates Shaw and Cathay produced Malay-language blockbusters on sound stages located in the Balestier and East Coast areas.
