Opening Night
By Justin Lowe
Following its well-received debut at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival, The Flip Side, a new black-and-white feature by Rod Pulido, opens the SFIAAFF with a comic inquiry into the nature of ethnic identity and cultural assimilation. When Darius Delacruz returns home from college, where he’s been petitioning administrators to offer Tagalog classes, his family becomes the next battleground for the exploration  and assertion of Filipino cultural heritage. But he faces an uphill battle as sister Marivic draws a line in the sand with plans for a nose job, and brother Davis insists on identifying with basketball stars and gangster rappers. Darius’ stealth strategy is to enlist Lolo, his Lotto-obsessed immigrant war veteran grandfather, in an amusing bid to reawaken the family’s inner Filipino.
Writer-director Pulido worked a day job as a substitute teacher over several years to fund The Flip Side, making admirable use of limited resources (including his parents’ home as a principal location) and contributing a significant achievement to the growing genre of Filipino American family drama. The characters are as strongly delineated as the social and cultural issues that Pulido addresses, eliciting a particularly impressive performance from first-time film actor Peping Baclig, a World War II Filipino veteran, as Lolo. |
