Shirkers

This documentary came highly recommended from sources I trust and is either praised to the rafters or leaves the viewer completely indifferent. I can understand why people clicked with this movie; I'm not confused why they enjoyed it but the euphoric reviews baffle me. For my part I found it sappy and trivial.

The documentary follows a woman, talking 20 years on, trying to piece together a lost film from her childhood in Singapore. The result is it's terribly self-important for someone who made two short films. Great documentaries, no matter how intimate or grand the subject, convince the viewer they're talking about something important. This element is missing. The film they were making didn't even look promising. To me it's no less vain and uninteresting to watch your average student filmmaker wax lyrical about their creative process but somehow this has more importance ascribed to it because... it's an older person saying it? There are great examples of documentaries about personal drama, about relationships, about the making of movies, yet this one lacked the punch and relevance of -any- of those.

The documentary also mentions Werner Herzog's film Fitzcarraldo - that film spawning the sweeping making-of documentary Burden of Dreams. Unintentionally this only serves to remind me of a filmmaker who actually did something noteworthy with their craft.

I will say as a documentary itself, it has a pleasing aesthetic and I can find no real technical faults. This is perhaps owing to the original film's film stock that nowadays evokes nostalgia in its viewers. This film also benefited from its audience seeking it out; it mainly attracted people who would enjoy this and I thought I'd be in that group. I'd be interested to see how a larger audience would react to this.

Ultimately it's the life story about someone who's not that interesting to listen to; a tale of a friendship that's not endearing; a making-of of a movie that didn't look good to begin with. Although what happened is terrible and unjust, it must unfortunately be admitted that the film world was at no great loss without that film and probably wouldn't be without this one.

I like the edit, the footages, the soundtrack, I feel the nostalgic the point of view and what the writer want to tell us, but I think it's misled. The most interesting part about the story is about George, what is his motives? What's he really do? Why he did it? We don't really have an answer for that. The documentary revolves around Sandi and her lost film, not George. I think George is a very interesting people and they didn't dig deeper, instead they tell you something that you less care about.

A great story that could've been cut by 30 minutes

As a piece of film-making in its own right, this a hypnotic and visually captivating production. As far as the content goes, it is just too self-important and pretentious to bear its own weight. The mystery regarding Georges is comfortably the most compelling aspect of the film yet is not explored in anywhere near enough detail. That is the real story here, not the group of amateur film-makers who naively lost their footage and have overblown their memories of it.

I heard the Sandi Tan interview on Fresh Air and was intrigued by Shirkers. Went into it with high expectations and thinking I knew what to expect, but was let down as I watched it unfold.

Tan narrates a film that is about her which includes video made by teenagers decades ago, a lot of people talking about Tan, and uninteresting storytelling.

It's a documentary with the seriousness and importance of a historic figure but the subject is a film critic/film maker describing this one mildly interesting thing that happened to her.

The premise was interesting, but it fell apart under the weight of her own self-importance.