In 1992, a budding Singaporean filmmaker named Sandi Tan, then 18, wrote a screenplay called Shirkers and recruited two cinephile classmates—Jasmine Ng and Sophie Siddique—to help produce it. Tan played S., a teenage outlaw with a distinctly Holden Caulfieldian worldview, who roams the sylvan landscape and dusty streets of a rapidly changing Singapore. The project would go down in the island nation’s slender cinematic history as the greatest indie movie never to see the light of day. That was because of Georges Cardona, Tan’s 40-something American film teacher, who signed on to direct Shirkers, then absconded with all 70 reels of footage, vanishing into thin air.

This year has abounded with stories of audacious grifters, and Cardona—who operated, says Tan, as “a kind of serial film thief,” taking pleasure in undermining the efforts of young filmmakers on multiple continents—may be our most compelling example yet. Tan grew up to be a “terrible 22-year-old” film critic, then a novelist (she penned 2012’s The Black Isle). Now 46, she’s finally a feature filmmaker: In 2011, a few years after her teacher’s untimely death, she was able to recover the Shirkers reels—mysteriously well preserved, yet incomplete—and this month, she’s unveiling a sort of remix on Netflix. Also called Shirkers, it’s a probing, wry, playful documentary that mashes up her original footage with archival video, graphics, voice-over, and interviews to tell the story not of S., but of her grown-up creator, in a “faux gumshoe” search for her long-lost younger self, and for posthumous traces of the con man whose betrayal shaped her adult life. For better or worse: “I’m of two minds,” Tan tells me, giggling, by Skype from her home in Los Angeles. “Because in an odd way the film exists better in this form.”

In its current manifestation, Shirkers is a beguiling, stranger-than-fiction caper about youthful gumption, older-male coercion, and female friendship gone awry (Tan and Ng have never quite resolved their differences about the escapade). It’s also, for Tan, a waltz with the ghost of Cardona, whose honed eye helped her create a movie as visually stunning as anything by, say, early Wes Anderson, and whose filmic obsession—he modeled himself after favorite characters, particularly James Spader’s dissolute drifter in Sex, Lies, and Videotape—taught her to see her own life in cinematic terms. “He wanted to be made mythic, and for years we resisted that,” she says of her ambivalence about granting him movie immortality. “But to tell our stories we had to tell his story. It’s like he gave me a gift I should not refuse, because it’s a good story.”

Tan and I chatted more about reincarnating Shirkers, why she thinks Cardona did what he did, and how revisiting her early ambitions has altered the course of her life.