Lost Valentine

As the Sundance-winning “Shirkers” makes its debut on Netflix, we speak to its director Sandi Tan and one of its stars Jasmine Ng, on the making of this film and its eventual screening, almost three decades later.

- Renee Batchelor

As the Sundance-winning “Shirkers” makes its debut on Netflix, we speak to its director Sandi Tan and one of its stars Jasmine Ng, on the making of this film and its eventual screening, almost three decades later.

I GREW UP in Singapore in the ’90s, coming of age in the latter half of the decade. It wasn’t easy to have fun then, so a lot of entertainment was self-created. Movies, books and albums were hard to get hold of, making them all the more precious. For the artistic soul who was not bound by the staidness of the city, the desire to experience “culture” and to create was always burning within.

Singapore was a different city then. While poised for economic greatness and still pristine on the surface, there was a sense of grittiness underneath its glossy veneer — if you knew where to look. And somewhere, a young Sandi Tan, wanted to capture the beauty and complexity of a fast-disappearing Singapore on film. Tan and her friends Jasmine Ng and Sophie Siddique, along with Georges Cardona — whom they met as an instructor at a filmmaking course in The Substation — decided to make a film. And “Shirkers” was born.

Tan wrote a script borne of her obsessions at that time, wanting to make Singapore look breathtaking on film. She also knew it was an uphill task. “I mean, of course, Singapore is flat and its tourist brochure patter was as bland as can be, so there lies the humour and the irony of my project. I was fully aware of the irony. Singapore was at a crossroads back in the early 1990s, poised between a more relaxed Southeast Asian identity and a global economic powerhouse with boundless ambition. This transformation would occur in the blink of an eye if nobody bothered to grab hold of these precious shards. And that’s exactly what I tried to do,” she explains.