About the Screening
Shirkers was a Singapore-made 1992 cult classic—or it would have been, had Sandi Tan's 16mm footage not been stolen by an enigmatic American collaborator. More than two decades later, Tan, now a novelist in L.A., returns to the country of her youth and to the memories of a man who both enabled and thwarted her dreams. Magically, too, she returns to the film itself, revived in a way she never could have imagined.
Includes a post-film conversation with Director Sandi Tan, moderated by Anne Thompson, Editor At Large, Indiewire
Sandi Tan, born in Singapore, published a cult zine called The Exploding Cat at 16 and at 22 became the film critic at The Straits Times , Singapore’s largest newspaper. Then she threw all that away to run off to film school at Columbia University. Her short films Moveable Feast and Gourmet Baby have played at over 100 film festivals including the New York Film Festival, Clermont-Ferrand and at MoMA, as well as broadcast internationally on RAI, SBS and ZDF/arte.
She is also the author of The Black Isle (Hachette USA), an epic novel that re-imagines Singapore’s 20 th century as a ghost story. It was a Publishers Weekly “Pick of the Week,” and has been described as an “ambitious” ( Los Angeles Times ), “cinematic” ( Kirkus Reviews ) and “gulpable” “psychosexual odyssey” ( Vogue ) that is “both epic and intimate” ( LA Weekly ) and “should not be missed” ( Philadelphia Inquirer ). The novel has been translated into Dutch, Turkish and Polish, and was a bestseller in Singapore for six weeks. She was a 2016 Sundance Documentary Film Program Fellow, a 2017 IFP Documentary Lab Fellow and a 2017 Sundance Creative Producing Fellow. She lives in Pasadena, California.