Sophia Siddique is a film scholar whose area of focus is contemporary Southeast Asian cinemas, film phenomenology, and genre (horror and science-fiction). She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Film at Vassar College. Siddique lives with a lovable feline rascal, Magnus, who is her creative muse!

Sophia’s unfinished project is a film called Shirkers, which she created in the early 1990s alongside Sandi Tan and Jasmine Ng. She met Sandi and Jasmine while studying film at Substation, Singapore’s first independent contemporary arts centre.

Shirkers is an incomplete film because after shooting was finished the director, Georges Cardona, took the recordings and refused anyone else access to them. The theft meant that Shirkers could never be fully produced and released as a complete feature film. Georges was involved in Shirkers because he taught the film course on which Sophia, Sandi, and Jasmine were enrolled.

The footage of Shirkers – but crucially not the sound recordings – was eventually recovered decades later. The recovery took place when, after Georges’ death, his ex-wife found and entrusted the film reels back to Sandi, Jasmine, and Sophia.

Sandi Tan tells that story in her excellent 2018 documentary, which is also called Shirkers and is available on Netflix. It contains lots of footage from the original film (which Sophia calls Shirkers 1.0), and features Sophia talking about her experiences of creating it.

As Sophia explains in our interview, taking part in the Shirkers documentary (which she refers to as Shirkers 2.0) has allowed her to access whole new ways of thinking about incomplete things, to use exciting experimental forms in her academic work, and to enjoy different, delightful approaches to living creatively.

Sophia tells me about the variety of emotions and youthful confidence involved in making Shirkers 1.0; about the vulnerability she experienced when watching Shirkers 2.0; about how her experiences with Georges prepared her for working with difficult people later in her career; about the impact of the Shirkers film on how scholars can think about films that are incomplete or no longer exist; and about the importance of staying for the credits when you go to the cinema.

Links of interest:

Sophia: https://www.vassar.edu/faculty/soharvey

Shirkers: https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/80241061

Incomplete: The Feminist Possibilities of the Unfinished BBC Film, edited by Alix Beeston and Stefan Solomon: https://www.ucpress.edu/books/incomplete/paper

Giselle Buchanan: http://www.gisellebuchanan.com/about-1

Allyson Nadia Field, Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the Possibility of Black Modernity: https://www.dukeupress.edu/uplift-cinema

unfinishing is the podcast about projects that are incomplete, abandoned, works in progress, or not public. It’s presented by Emily Anderson and the ⁠artwork is by Graham Oakes⁠. If you have an incomplete or private project you’d like to talk about, please email unfinishing.pod@gmail.com, ⁠contact Em on Instagram @unfinishingpod⁠, or on ⁠Twitter @TrueBagglerag⁠.

unfinishing is the podcastabout projects that are incomplete, abandoned, or not public. It’s presented by Emily Anderson and the artwork is by Graham Oakes. If you have an incomplete or private project you’d like to talk about, please email unfinishing.pod@gmail.com, contact Em on Instagram @unfinishingpod, or on Twitter @TrueBagglerag.

My guest in this episode is Lorraine Topper, who is a writer and a fashion history researcher. She has, for the last decade, focused on clothing stories from the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Her research has been featured as part of public programmes at the M&S Archive, the V&A, The Courtauld, and the Museum of London.

After completing a Master’s in History and Culture of Fashion where she wrote tens of thousands of words about underwear, she really wanted to turn her bra history research into book. However, after years of trying and failing, once she finally had a book contract and tried to get stuck into the writing she realised it wasn't the right path for her...

Links of interest: https://linktr.ee/masterofbras

unfinishing is the podcast about projects that are incomplete, abandoned, or not public. It’s presented by Emily Anderson and the artwork is by Graham Oakes. If you have an incomplete or private project you’d like to talk about, please email unfinishing.pod@gmail.com, contact Em on Instagram @unfinishingpod, or on Twitter @TrueBagglerag.

In this epsiode Guy Waites talks about his experience sailing solo round the world, spending months alone at sea as part of the Golden Globe Race.

Over the course of the race, Guy and the other entrants faced huge storms, enormous waves, and of course the immense psychological challenge of being alone for months and months.

But, incredibly, it wasn’t any of those challenges that prevented Guy from finishing his circumnavigation in one go. It was: barnacles. So many barnacles attached themselves to Guy’s boat that he was forced to stop to remove them.

Somewhat brilliantly, though, and despite having been excluded from the race, Guy decided to continue with his journey. He completed his circumnavigation after 287 days at sea – and also having run out of food for the last few of those days.

Find out more about Guy here: https://guywaitessailing.com/

Read about the Golden Globe Race here: https://goldengloberace.com/skippers/guy-waites/

Read about the Jester Challenge here: https://jesterchallenge.wordpress.com/what-is-the-jester-challenge/

unfinishing is the podcast about projects that are incomplete, abandoned, or not public. It’s presented by Emily Anderson and the artwork is by Graham Oakes. If you have an incomplete or private project you’d like to talk about, please email unfinishing.pod@gmail.com, contact Em on Instagram @unfinishingpod, or on Twitter @TrueBagglerag.

In this episode Andy Jaggard tells the story of an unfinished memoir that was written by his father Gerald.

Andy discovered the memoir after his father died, and reading it opened up a maze of mysteries and unanswered questions.

The memoir includes a lot of reflection about Andy’s grandfather – who was called Captain William Jaggard and who established a well-known bookshop in Stratford-upon-Avon. Captain Jaggard firmly believed that he was descended from the printers (whose family name is also Jaggard) who published the First Folio of Shakespeare’s work in 1623. In the end Andy hired a professional genealogist to find out whether his grandfather was right...

But what’s really central to the memoir is the personal story it tells. When Andy found it, it ended abruptly at a crucial moment in the story.

A mysterious call from an American researcher eventually prompted Andy to research his father’s life, and to finish the memoir. In the process, he discovered some truly extraordinary events in the history of his family.

The completed memoir was published in April 2023. It’s called "Shakespeare Press" - the memoir of Gerald Jaggard completed by Andy Jaggard.

Links of interest

The Shakespeare Press: https://www.waterstones.com/book/shakespeare-press/andy-jaggard/9781739307707

Find out more about Gerald’s memoir on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shakespeare_press_book/

Find out more online: https://shakespeare-press.com/

unfinishing is the podcast about projects that are incomplete, abandoned, or not public. It’s presented by Emily Anderson and the artwork is by Graham Oakes. If you have an incomplete or private project you’d like to talk about, please email unfinishing.pod@gmail.com, contact Em on Instagram @unfinishingpod, or on Twitter @TrueBagglerag.

My guest in this episode is Alix Beeston, who is a writer and a Senior Lecturer in English at Cardiff University, where she researches and teaches twentieth and twenty-first century film, photography, and literature.

Alix is the perfect guest – in the last few years she’s been studying unfinished creative work. She approaches unfinished films and literary texts as windows onto the realities of artistic production for women, including the systemic barriers that affect that labour, and also as constituting significant artistic work in its own right, even if it doesn't achieve the completion of a distributed film or a published book.

In summer 2023 she published Incomplete: The Feminist Possibilities of the Unfinished Film, a collection of essays that she co-edited with Stefan Solomon.

Links of interest

Incomplete: The Feminist Possibilities of the Unfinished Film: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520381476/incomplete

Out of Sight: Modernist Writing and the Photographic Unseen: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/in-and-out-of-sight-9780197673010?lang=en&cc=gb

unfinishing is the podcast about projects that are incomplete, abandoned, or not public. It’s presented by Emily Anderson and the artwork is by Graham Oakes. If you have an incomplete or private project you’d like to talk about, please email unfinishing.pod@gmail.com, contact Em on Instagram @unfinishingpod, or on Twitter @TrueBagglerag.

My guests in this episode to open Series 3 are Jen Simonic and Masey Kaplan. Together, Jen and Masey founded the Loose Ends project.

The Loose Ends project has created an enormous community of knitters, embroiderers, and crafters of all varieties around the world, who finish textile works that have been left incomplete when the original crafters have passed away or become ill.

Masey and Jen have some incredibly inspiring and moving stories about the unfinished projects that have been submitted to Loose Ends – as well as some very funny ones.

To submit an unfinished project to Loose Ends, to volunteer as a finisher or translator, and to donate, visit www.looseendsproject.org.