Before she was so rudely interrupted: 'Shirkers' director Sandi Tan on realizing a dream deferred
What happens to a dream deferred? Filmmaker Sandi Tan has had to grapple with that question for the last 25 years.
In 1992, the then-19-year-old made an ambitious and ultra-low budget road movie with friends Jasmine Ng and Sophie Siddique that seemed certain to become a cult classic in their native Singapore - if only because the country's film production was essentially nonexistent. But then Georges Cardona, the mysterious, middle-aged American film teacher who was tasked with directing the project, vanished without a trace and took 70 canisters of film, boxes of scripts and storyboards with him.
"It was a slow drip, the realization," Tan says of having the footage taken. "It just kills you slowly. It was months, maybe years before it dawned on us.
"It's like we remembered what it was like to fly and now we have to walk forever. You are back to Earth, doomed to never speak of
