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When Sandi Tan was nineteen, she decided to make her own film. Home in Singapore for the summer of 1992, she recruited her friends Jasmine Ng and Sophia Siddique to film Shirkers, based on a screenplay penned by Tan herself. Also enlisted was Tan’s enigmatic mentor, Georges Cardona, “a man of unplaceable age and origin”. Once filming wrapped, Tan, Ng and Siddique returned to university in England, New York and LA respectively, leaving Cardona with the footage. They were never to see him again.

Shirkers is a documentary about a twin set of mysteries: the mystery of what happened to the original Shirkers footage and the mystery of Georges Cardona. While I won’t go into the specifics, it is not too much of a spoiler to say the footage was eventually found; the story of its filming and later disappearance is spliced throughout with scenes from the missing footage.

It is from this footage that Shirkers draws its magic. Chopped into individual moments and scenes, it is both wacky and dreamlike, weird and wonderful. Featuring a giant wolfhound named ‘Cherish’, child ballerinas dancing around topiaries, a succession of chain-smoking middle-aged women, teenage girls wandering down empty motorways, it captures an image of 1990s Singapore that oozes colour – both literally and figuratively.

If the film disappoints in any way, it is that we never quite get to the bottom of Georges Cardona. Tan recounts her own friendship with him, interviews people who knew him (including his widow, who chose not to be identified), traces his roots and yet still fails to satisfactorily pin him down. One suspects that perhaps a man as bizarre and capriciousinconstant as Cardona lacked anything solid about him to pin down.

What the film instead makes its substance is a portrait of particular people, in a particular place, at a particular time, of the film that brought them all together and then haunted them for the next two decades. It works because of the fascinating characters at its core, the knotty friendships, the earnestness and creativity that illuminates every shot. In its charming idiosyncrasies, Shirkers achieves the rare feat of making you nostalgic for people and a place you never knew.