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Platform also acquires doc short Zion.

Netflix has boarded worldwide rights to Sandi Tan’s personal quest story Shirkers following its recent world premiere in Sundance.

Singapore-born Los Angeles resident Tan won the directing award in the World Cinema Documentary category last month for the film about her journey to uncover the mystery behind her missing film.

After Tan and friends Jasmine Ng and Sophie Siddique shot a noir film in Singapore in 1992, their American director and mentor Georges Cardona made off with the 16mm footage and was never seen again. Netflix negotiated the deal with Josh Braun of Submarine on behalf of filmmakers.

Netflix has acquired the worldwide rights to Shirkers, a doc that premiered at this year's Sundance film festival where director Sandi Tan won the directing award in world cinema documentary.

Tan, Jasmine Ng and Sophia Siddique made a 16mm noir in Singapore in 1992, titled Shirkers, that was stolen by their American collaborator Georges Cardona, who then disappeared. More than two decades later, Tan, now a novelist in L.A., received the 70 canisters of film, prompting her to return home.

The streamer also picked up doc short Zion, which follows Zion Clark, a young wrestler born without legs who grew up in foster care.

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Netflix announced Wednesday that it has acquired worldwide rights to Sandi Tan’s documentary feature “Shirkers,” which won the Directing Award in World Cinema Documentary following its world premiere at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. The film screened to great acclaim and will next be shown at the True/False Film Festival in Columbia, Missouri, on March 2. An inspired labor of love for zine-making teens Sandi Tan, Jasmine Ng and Sophie Siddique, “Shirkers” was a Singapore-made 1992 cult classic — or it would have been, had the 16mm footage not been stolen by their enigmatic American collaborator Georges Cardona, who disappeared. More...

“Shirkers” is a documentary about the production of an uncompleted movie, but it doubles as an upgraded version of the missing project itself. As a punk teen in early-nineties Singapore, Sandi Tan wrote a feminist slasher movie for the ages, an exploitation road movie designed to ruminate on the energy of youth, creativity, and alienation. The director, a much older American high school instructor with dubious motives, stole the film canisters for unknown reasons and vanished into the mist; two decades later, Tan has completed a fascinating personal look at her quest to uncover his motives, resurrecting the significance of her original intentions in the process.

Tan’s actual debut, “Shirkers” takes its title from her earlier effort, an adorably deranged slasher movie in which she starred as a bored young woman killing men to pass the time. Though her old pals celebrate its relevance to Singapore’s minuscule film community at the time,...