Shirkers
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The 2010s in 10 Double Features
“I can’t commit to a movie.” In the era of limitless streaming “content,” no phrase has more irrevocably warped our viewing habits. If a single film now represents a commitment, then a double feature might as well be a back-to-back life-sentence. Why trudge through all that first-act boredom, after all, when you’re already so behind on The Good Place? Despite the siren song of bingeable TV, the dual bill holds strong as a way to burn a night at the movies. Art-house theaters, digital programmers, and genre festivals still love them, as does any cinephile looking to hunker down with […]
by Soheil Rezayazdi on Dec 30, 2019 -
2018 As a Year in Double Features
Every year, when looked back upon in its final days, reveals patterns. For the past four years, I’ve capped the holiday season with a list of 10 double features from the year in film here at Filmmaker. Each capsule review is, in essence, a mini-thinkpiece on a cinematic trend from the year. This past year gave us many such boomlets: the year of the horse movie, the year of the “white voice” movie, the year of the movie set entirely on digital screens. A delightful interplay emerges when you watch, or think about, films in pairs. One movie brings out […]
by Soheil Rezayazdi on Dec 31, 2018 -
Minding the Gap Leads This Year’s Cinema Eye Honors Nominees
The non-fiction-centric awards body Cinema Eye Honors announced its nominees for 2018, ranging over 10 categories, such as directing, production, cinematography and, of course, Outstanding Achievement in Nonfiction Feature Filmmaking. Among the biggest recipients is Bing Liu’s Minding the Gap, which raked up a total of seven nominations — the most of any title this year. Others with multiple nominees include Robert Greene’s Bisbee ’17, RaMell Ross’ Hale County This Morning, This Evening and Sandi Tan’s Shirkers. The winners will be announced at the 2019 Honors Awards Ceremony on January 10, 2019, which will be held at the Museum of […]
by Matt Prigge on Nov 9, 2018 -
Five Questions for Shirkers Director Sandi Tan
With Sandi Tan’s beautifully cinephilic autobiographical documentary Shirkers arriving in theaters and on Netflix this Friday, October 26, we’re reposting our interview with Tan out of Sundance, 2018. As I wrote earlier in the festival, “Sandi Tan’s debut feature Shirkers is the 26-years-later compromise-of-necessity incarnation of a film that almost was. Shot in 1992, when Tan was in college, from a proudly illogical script of her own devising, Shirkers was meant to be a rare, hopefully transformative Singaporean independent film in a country without much history of those. Directed by Tan’s ambivalently-motivated mentor Georges Cardona — who subsequently absconded with […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 24, 2018 -
The Cine-Ghosts of Shirkers
Some of my best conversations have been with people who weren’t there. Absent was OK—even nonexistent was OK. As long as I imagined somebody was there. I did that as a prolific letter writer, I did that as a novelist, and most recently, I did that as a filmmaker. More than 20 years after the defining trainwreck of my youth—having my teacher/mentor disappear with all the footage of a 16mm film we’d shot together—I decided to make a film that would both document the joys and perils of teenage creativity and unfurl the detective work behind the mystery of the […]
by Sandi Tan on Sep 17, 2018 -
“The Relationship Between Fiction and Non-Fiction Genres”: Editor Kimberley Hassett on Shirkers
We’ve already written about Sandi Tan‘s Shirkers, her debut feature documentary named after the long-lost footage from her 1992 would-be feature debut of the same names. Under the mentorship of the mysterious Georges Cardona, the college-age Tan and friends embarked on making a rare Singaporean independent film; this documentary revisits that film and tells the story of Tan’s life to date while on the trail of the elusive Cardona. We’ve also already posted an interview with early project editor Lucas Celler; here, we pass on the baton to editor Kimberley Hassett, who brought the film to final cut. Filmmaker: How and why […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 30, 2018 -
“Blissful Madness!”: Lucas Celler on Editing Sandi Tan’s Documentary Shirkers
Twenty-some years ago, Sandi Tan and her friends shot a 16mm thriller called Shirkers. It was a guerilla-style production in her home country of Singapore. The film, however, was never finished because a member of the crew – the mysterious Georges – stole all the footage and disappeared. Tan’s new documentary, Shirkers, is an experimental dive into that footage and what it meant to her as a young filmmaker. Tan hired filmmaker Lucas Celler to edit and give shape to the film. Below, Celler discusses editing this “collage film, constructed with everything from video to film to photos to maps to […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 24, 2018 -
Sundance 2018 Critic’s Notebook, Day 4: Eighth Grade, Shirkers, Piercing
I suppose I should lead with Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade, one of the fest’s breakouts or something along those lines — it arrived as an A24 production with Scott Rudin as one of the producers, so clearly people were going to be curious. The title is basically the movie: in her last week of middle school hell, awkward Kayla (Elsie Fisher) — voted by her otherwise indifferent classmates as most quiet — fumbles through a cool kids’ pool party she shouldn’t be at. Kayla shadows a high school senior and is invited to hang out with her crew. That temporary boost […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 22, 2018 -
“How Are We Not Going Insane?”: Director Sandi Tan | Shirkers
As you made your film during the increasingly chaotic backdrop of the last year, how did you as a filmmaker control, ignore, give in to or, conversely, perhaps creatively exploit the wild and unpredictable? What roles did chaos and order play in your films? It’s been my fortune to have been submerged in the sticky, sometimes pungent, always time-warping swamp of personal documentary filmmaking these past three years. My own narcissism (often in the form of horror at seeing/hearing myself on camera) has helped to blot out much of the real-life cataclysms the world has been experiencing since November 8, […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 21, 2018
