Shirkers — a new Sundance award-winning documentary billed as a kaleidoscopic punk rock ghost story — is a wild ride. Released globally by Netflix on Oct. 26, the film chronicles the surreal account of a Singapore-made cult classic production that went missing 26 years ago.

The original Shirkers feature — created by brilliant local rebels Sandi Tan, Jasmine Ng and Sophie Siddique when they were nineteen — would have been Singapore's first indie film, a visionary mood piece about a sixteen-year-old killer on the road. But after shooting wrapped, Tan’s mentor, an enigmatic American called Georges Cardona, vanished from Singapore with all seventy cans of film. Set in the present-day, after a surprise phone call brings Shirkers back to Tan, Ng and Siddique, the documentary asks: why did Shirkers disappear?

To the viewer’s delight, the part-mystery, part-memoir documentary is as punk and inventive as the film it chases down. Director Sandi Tan, now a 46-year-old novelist living in California, revisits the Shirkers period of her life through a hodgepodge of mediums: Super8, 16mm, Hi8, VHS tapes, handwritten letters, postcards, found footage, scrapbooks, clips from other movies, animation, interviews and at one point, dead mosquitoes catalogued in a notebook.

Tan is a master of the collage aesthetic. Rather than simply remastering the lovely Wes Anderson-esque film from the original, the documentary exploits its explosive visual glory to reclaim Shirkers from the shadowy tutelage of Cardona. As a reviewer for Vox [notes]((https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/10/26/18029048/shirkers-review-netflix-sandi-tan-streaming), Shirkers becomes “a kind of punk feminist project” that “put[s] it [Shirkers] back in the hands of its rightful owners.”

If Shirkers suffers from anything, it is the uneasy treatment of Cardona, a soft-spoken yet charismatic cinephile “of unplaceable age and origin.” He teaches the girls filmmaking, drives them around the island and even invites Tan, then a college student, to join him on a road trip around the USA. Tan’s choice to reproduce the audio cassettes Cardona sent her, and digitally manipulate the footage where he appears on set is creepy and haunting, as we struggle to understand why Cardona committed a crime.

This whodunnit focus on Cardona detracts from Tan’s own virtuosity. One of the most arresting motifs in Shirkers is a grainy, unscripted shot of Cardona’s icy blue eyes staring into Tan’s camera as she flicks an overhead car light on and off. It is spliced, slowed down and repeated several times, with gossamery electronica looped in the soundtrack. I held my breath. Stories of older men with young women hopefuls in the film industry don’t end well. But when the reason why Cardona stole Shirkers is finally revealed, it seems like the documentary’s fixation with Cardona was a red herring. Far more fascinating was Tan’s retelling. As it turns out, the “ghost story” in Shirkers is not about the ghost of Cardona, but rather the many ghosts of Tan’s past.

How does Tan exorcise these ghosts, post-mortem her film auteur dreams? The patchwork documentary flips from recovered Shirkers footage — with Tan and her friends frozen in time — to the three women today. What does it mean to grow up a young artist in a conservative country? To lose yourself to art? To lose your art? Tan's unorthodox interviews of Ng and other crew members, which include boom mics, unedited verbal tics and mirrors where you can see Tan herself, remind us that even the so-called fact in documentary is constructed. Life and art, as shown in the Shirkers saga, are inextricably linked.

As a Singaporean, I was amazed at how the landscapes of Singapore from the 1990’s tugged at my heartstrings. There were the schoolgirls in an NTUC supermarket in retro pink uniforms, the intricate Chinese paper decorations of a beauty parlor and children playing in lush tropical greenery next to one of the first railway trains. I didn't recognize some of the buildings because they had been bulldozed. Imagine, I thought, growing up as a young writer in Singapore and seeing a work of art by Singaporean teenagers as bold as this.

But to call Shirkers a yearning for a bygone Singapore is to reduce it to one-noted nostalgia. It is so much more — a beautiful, messy love letter to cinema. In Shirkers, I’m reminded of the kaleidoscopic possibilities of film itself.