An quirky search-for-the-truth documentary about a missing film: Shirkers

Sandi Tan's 2018 documentary, Shirkers, gets off to a bumpy start but by the end catches us up in its pathos and humor. Tan narrates the story of her life as a filmmaker, centered on the creation and then the mysterious loss of a film she and some friends produced when they were college students, the eponymous Shirkers. ST, now about 40 years old, grew up in Singapore, where she and 2 girlfriends were into punk, alternative rock, world cinema, and all forms of creative expression; there are and were kids like them in every single school in the U.S., but in Singapore they were complete outliers. Pursuing their mutual interest in film, they took a course in what looks to be some kind of community school, a class led by a 30ish man, Georges Cardona, who turns out to be strange to say the least. The 2 young women leave Singapore for first year of college - 2 to the US and Tan to England - and continue communications w/ Cardona (he primarily sends odd tape recordings of his brief messages to them rather than calls, cards, letters); he encourages the 3 to return to Singapore for the summer to make a movie. Tan writes a screenplay that everyone raves about; at this point her film looks to be incredibly disorganized and amateurish, but they get enough money to spend the whole summer shooting. They all return to school in the fall, leaving the film - about 70 "cans" - with Cardona to edit. And that's the last they see of the film - Cardona disappears along w/ all the video and audio. I won't provide any spoilers; however, I'll say that up to this point in the film - a bit more than halfway in - I was disappointed: Cardona is such an obvious phony and pathological liar, perhaps even a predator, that it was hard to believe these young women were so trusting in him. And the film they were working on looked to be a disaster - perhaps it was best that they just move on. The 2nd half of Shirkers, however, really picked up my interest, as Tan in particular tries to sleuth out what happened to Cardona and to the film. Without divulging anything, I'll say only that it's nice at the end to see where the 3 filmmakers are today and how much - or how little - they've changed over the years. This documentary will recall in some way other search-for-the-truth dox such as Searching for Sugar Man; I don't see this film as a likely commercial success - a little too quirky for that - but it's worth a look.