Shirkers

In the closing moments of the Sundance award-winning documentary —a compelling but compromised chronicle of the campaign to reclaim the lost and then found film of the same name—the original film’s screenwriter and star Sandi Tan tries to put some kind of a bow on the end of a devastating process that has defined her career since 1992. A collage artist in her youth and, in later years, a horror novelist and self-described “terrible film critic” for a Singapore newspaper, Tan has been haunted for 20 years by the memory of the wild and undisciplined film she developed as a precocious 18-year-old—a film which was then unceremoniously stolen from her by her director