So in 1991, a 19-year-old Singaporean girl named Sandi Tan, already active in Singapore’s underground punk art scene, wrote a screenplay for a movie called “Shirkers.” She and her friends, along with their film-class teacher/mentor, spent a summer making the film. And then the teacher dude disappeared on them, taking all the film with him. 25 years later, he died, and the widow called Tan up to let her know that there were all these film canisters labelled “Shirkers” that seemed to have something to do with her.

This movie, despite its title, is not that “Shirkers.” This is a documentary that Tan made about… all of that. It’s a look back at her teenage years, at her friends, and then about how they all decided to make this movie, with interviews of the now middle-aged women looking back at the time; it’s an investigation into the mystery of the teacher (who is super-sketch from like minute one as they introduce him, and turns out to be a really inexplicably weird guy); it’s a kind of meditation on the ways that having this film going missing affected all of them — they had made a movie, and then suddenly they hadn’t; it’s a portrait of the women’s friendship over the years since they were teens, even as they moved across continents and grew into their professional careers; it’s about having this kind of time capsule of your youth that’s been lost to you for decades, and what it means to see all this again through your adult eyes, and to remember it all fresh; and of course it’s this kind of what-if story — how different would their lives have gone if this film had been released? What impact would it have had on Singaporean indie cinema and on their own futures?

Critics love this movie, of course, because critics love movies that are about movies, as this is; but it’s better than just that — it’s fascinating and poignant and touching.