Dream Thief: A Short Write-Up About Shirkers (2018)
(Initially published on 19/07/2024)
Georges Cardona (central) and Sandi Tan (right) in Shirkers
I struggle to pick films. That’s the truth.
If you know me, then you know that I love film. It is, well, everything to me. I love watching them, I love reading about them, and I love (evidently) writing about them. If anything, that aforementioned deliberation should come as no surprise! Looking through the endless amount of “oh, I’ll get round to that one day!” entries on my watchlist is a task - in terms of pure stress levels - I would describe as on-par to being hunted for sport. What if I pick a bad one? What if there’s one that would eye-rollingly validate me more as someone who’s “more into film”? What. If…and I’m even worse at picking documentaries. According to my Letterboxd, documentaries only make up a mere 41 out of the 1500+ movies I’ve seen. That’s not even 3%.
However, a month ago…something happened. I don’t know if my brain chemistry was altered that day, but I decided to stick on a documentary that has long been collecting dust on my watchlist. An out of character move on my part, but trust me, it was so worth that risk.
Shirkers directed by Singaporean film critic and filmmaker Sandi Tan was met with heavy showers of praise upon release…and my god… now I can see why.
Other than a reminder that I need to grit my teeth and make more obscure choices when going through my watchlist, Shirkers wiped me off my feet and reminded me to recontextualise a certain kind of cliche. You often hear the phrase “movies have the power to change the world” as a half-earnest, half-joke sentiment tossed about in film circles. Nonetheless, it’s entirely true…if they get made. Shirkers is as much about the power of cinema as it is the power to hide it.
Monsters are among us, and they’re stealing cinema.
‘Lost Film’ is an infamous, tragic subset of this endlessly fascinating hobby. Ben Childs writes in The Guardian on a report by the US Library of Congress that “only 14% of a total of around 11,000 movies made between 1912 and 1930 exist in their original format [...] many of the lost film prints fell victim to fire or deterioration. Others were neglected or destroyed”. Flash forward to the 2020s and we’re still seeing films that are being, albeit perhaps not so viciously destroyed in vault fires, but alternatively and rather more depressingly, finished/near-finished only to be locked away forever. People can point fingers towards the hypothetical quality of movies like Batgirl or Coyote vs. ACME (both unreleased by WB Discovery for the purpose of a tax write-off) with a snide sense of ‘good riddance’, more of a statement on the alarming amount of IP filler that we’re dished out by studios these days. Respectfully, that’s a dangerous mindset. Yes…it could suck, but the point is that we will never know if it will.
Shirkers, then, serves as a dazzling blind spot for many in the ever growing list of reasons as to why films become lost…
…sometimes all it takes is one. fucking. guy.
The primary heartbreak of the film is a dynamic of toxic power, control, and manipulation. Tan becomes chronically infatuated with filmmaking in an environment that is - let’s say sensitive - to the more unconventional movies put out there, and is subsequently taken under the wing by her nuclear-grade level pretentious film school teacher/director: Georges Cardona. Together they collaborate with an entire cast and crew on what would-be Singapore’s first road trip movie, then just like that, Cardona vanishes with the footage. The movie is dead. Shirkers…is dead.
There are a lot of emotions I went through after watching Shirkers, but the one that stood out most in my heart was rage. Unfiltered, dramatic, appalled rage. Which, in hindsight, is less of the film's takeaway message more than it is a completely natural response to one of the most diabolical things I’ve witnessed happen to someone’s creative endeavour. I digress, Shirkers leaves us with a deliberately hopeful message. In 2011, Cardona died, and the footage (in great condition, but without audio) was recovered from his house. We have, of course, been watching it this whole time, a ghostly apparition of something that could’ve been. The movie Tan wrote, a potential landmark in Singaporean filmmaking is dead, but Shirkers the documentary is very much alive and kicking.
I think there’s a lot that the ending of Shirkers means to me, but the most formative is this: that rage I felt? It was short lived, just as that betrayal Tan and her fellow creatives went through was but a mere speedbump in the artistic route they’ve been traversing their entire lives.
For a lot of people, Cardona will represent the absolute, bottom of the barrel, worst kind of gatekeeper. A hideous, misogynistic presence that can’t help but compulsively lie and take.
A true dream thief.
For others, including myself, Cardona might represent something more internalised. The very real fear that your dream might be taken away from you. Tan’s movie has left me with the hope that everything is recoverable. That unfinished project? Finish it. That unsalvageable footage? Save what you can, and make something anew. Those lost films? Welp, maybe they’ll be found.
It might not be what you envisioned, but what you might get out of it…is a Shirkers.
