All in the Family Pinoyed
Rod Pulido's The Flip Side

by Daniel C. Tsang

Filmmaker Rod Pulido's The Flip Side was the first feature-length
Filipino-American film to premiere at Sundance. Luckily for Robert
Redford's famed indie festival, The Flip Side is a real gem, rich in
intelligent, often hilarious dialog. A fast-moving satire about a
Filipino family in suburban Southern California, it's All in the
Family fastforwarded several decades and Pinoyed.

Pulido, a Cal State Long Beach film grad who was born and raised in
Cerritos, deliberately shot his film in 16 mm black-and-white to
underscore Filipino-Americans'—and fellow Asian-Americans'—exclusion
from a national discourse on race that is limited to black and white.
It's also Pulido's attempt to indict Hollywood, which, despite
showing films in Technicolor, relegates Asians to virtual
invisibility.

College student Darius Delacruz (superbly played by former UC Irvine
history/international-studies student Verwin Gatpandan) has joined a
campus group, Kababayan, to agitate for Tagalog to be taught on
campus. It's art imitating life, for across the street from where the
film will make its Orange County debut is UCI, where Filipino-
American students are still demanding permanent Tagalog classes. They
argue that Filipino-Americans, the second-largest Asian subgroup in
the United States, deserve better treatment.

Darius, discovering his roots, prances around the house half-naked in
tribal bahag (loin cloth), speaks Tagalog at the dinner table, and
decorates his bedroom walls with posters of heroes of the Philippine
Revolution and the California farm workers' movement (like United
Farm Workers' Philip Vera Cruz). His happily assimilated dad (played
well by Abe Pagtama) thinks his son has joined "some kind of crazy,
radical" group.

Darius' kid brother Davis (impressively acted by Jose Saenz, a.k.a.
the rapper Flipchild) can't dig his bro's "back to the roots" shit.
Instead, he speaks fast in hip-hop lingo and wants to be an NBA star.
Neurotic older sister Marivic (ably performed by UCI drama graduate
Ronalee Par) calls Davis a "wannabe nigger." In jumps politically
correct Darius, twice reminding her to say "wannabe African-American"
instead.

A basketball fanatic, Davis is only five-feet-five-inches tall, so he
hangs from the stairs, trying in vain to stretch himself to gain just
two inches so he can be like his idol, NBA guard Spud Webb. Davis
also wishes he has even just "an ounce" of "black blood" in him.

Darius' facility with Tagalog comes in handy at the dinner table when
he lets slip in his native tongue that wannabe-whitey sis wants a
nose job. The parents are shocked, but the supportive mom (the
director's actual mother, Ester Pulido) eventually pays for the
operation.

With four days left in the shoot, Pulido found the elderly Manong
Peping Baclig in Los Angeles to play Grandpa Lolo. Baclig, a Bataan
Death March survivor during World War II, performs his role
exquisitely. Often left to eat alone in his room, Lolo is ignored by
everyone in the family except grandson Darius. In fact, Lolo manages
to sneak out regularly to buy Lotto tickets, hoping to win enough
money to go back to the Philippines.

Another unforgettable character is Davis' pal Roland (Cal State
Fullerton student Clint Labrador), a fellow ball player Davis
calls "felatio boy." In an attempt to get girls ("honeys," as he
calls them), Roland seeks to add a tongue stud so he can
master "felatio." He, of course, meant to say "cunnilingus."

The musical score includes traditional Filipino music (such as gong
chimes), plus tracks by poet Name Life that underline the hip-hop
chatter between Davis and Roland.

Indie Pinoy films such as The Flip Side and last year's The Debut
have made it out of the festival circuit into your neighborhood
cineplexes because of positive word-of-mouth and the concerted
efforts of legions of volunteers. If you'd like to join, check out
the film's website (www.flipsidemovie.com).

THE FLIP SIDE WAS WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY ROD PULIDO; AND STARS
VERWIN GATPANDAN, JOSE SAENZ, RONALEE PAR, ABE PAGTAMA, ESTER PULIDO
AND MANONG PEPING BACLIG. OPENS FRIDAY FOR AN EXCLUSIVE TWO-WEEK RUN
AT EDWARDS UNIVERSITY, IRVINE, AND EDWARDS CERRITOS 10, CERRITOS.