Institute History
Description
In the summer of 1992, teenage film geek Sandi Tan and her friends, Sophie and Jasmine, shot Singapore’s first indie film, a road movie called “Shirkers,” with their enigmatic American film instructor Georges Cardona. Sandi wrote the script and played the lead. It was an ambitious experiment shot on free Kodak stock, featuring 100 actors in 100 locations and the largest dog in the country. When shooting wrapped, Cardona absconded with all of the footage… leaving Sandi and her friends devastated, and causing that summer to evaporate into myth. 20 years later, the 16mm cans are recovered in New Orleans. Sandi, now a novelist in Los Angeles, travels across two continents to uncover Cardona’s vanishing footprints and her own. The result: a uniquely personal punk rock ghost story. The “lost” 16mm footage, surprising interviews and Sandi’s own considerable archive form a kaleidoscopic portrait of friendship, memory, and mad movie love.