December 13, 2018

Singapore documentary Shirkers won the Best Director award for World Cinema Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival this past January and is now available as a Netflix Original. Shirkers tells the story of how three friends, Sandi Tan, Jasmine Ng Kin Kia, and Sophie Siddique made a movie together in 1992 with the help of American mentor Georges Cardona. However, this is far from a heartwarming story. The documentary focuses on Mr Cardona’s disappearance of the film reels after the movie was shot. In 2011, four years after his passing, his widow emailed Ms Tan the reels of the film, preserved but without sound. With the materials she received, Ms Tan applied and was accepted to the 2016 Sundance Documentary Fellows programme and received grants to make Shirkers.

Ms Ng, part-time lecturer at the NUS Department of English Language and Literature and associate producer of Shirkers, shared with The Straits Times how the experience with Mr Cardona was a rude awakening that prompted her to contemplate her own stance on ethics, as a creative and educator. She emphasises the documentary’s driving message of integrity and doing right by people—values that she hopes to convey to her students, beyond film techniques and aesthetics. Ms Ng believes that film is a great medium for teaching anything ranging from history to mathematics to exploring the human condition.

Read more here.