Another Singaporean achievement at Sundance

Writer: Florey DM

A still from Sandi Tan's feature directorial debut, "Shirkers".

29 Jan – Singapore is on a roll at the Sundance Film Festival, this year it's thanks to a Singapore-born filmmaker by the name of Sandi Tan.

The 45-year-old US-based filmmaker was recently named Best Director under the World Cinema Documentary Competition, via her feature directorial debut, "Shirkers".

Formerly a The Straits Times' film critic from 1995 to 1997, and educated at the University of Kent and Columbia University, where she received her Master of Fine Arts in Screenwriting degree, Tan's film is an indie-project-turned-documentary, according to The Straits Times.

Originally, it was shot as an indie film back in 1992, starring Tan herself as a teenage assassin called S, who uses her fingers twisted into the shape of a gun as her weapon.

Shot guerilla-style in the streets of Singapore, the then 19-year-old Tan worked on the film with her friends Jasmine Ng and Sophia Siddique Harvey, and her mentor, American film school teacher Georges Cardona.

L-R: Jessica Levin (producer), Quinn Walker (songwriter), Jasmine Ng (associate producer), Sandi Tan (director), Sophia Siddique Harvey (associate producer) and guest at the premiere of "Shirkers" at Sundance (Photo Source: AFP | The Straits Times).

The indie film never saw the light of day as Cardona vanished without a word, taking the project along with him.

It was only in 2011 that Cardona's widow started sending Tan the reels and scripts he had kept over the years, though Tan never did anything about the footage she'd gotten back until three and a half years later, when she decided to turn it into a documentary.

Now "Shirkers" tells of Tan's journey while making her first unrealised film project, interwoven with interviews with Ng and Harvey and people who knew Cardona.

This year's Sundance Film Festival was held in Park City, Utah from 18 to 28 January 2018.

Last year, another female filmmaker, Kirsten Tan, achieved a first in Singaporean film history when her feature directorial debut "Pop Aye" won the World Cinema Dramatic Special Jury Award for Screenplay accolade under Sundance's World Cinema Dramatic Competition.

Her film was the first Singaporean title to join the competition and the first to also win an award at Sundance.