ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Joseph Perry writes for the film websites Gruesome Magazine, The Scariest Things, Horror Fuel and Diabolique Magazine; for the film magazines Phantom of the Movies’ VideoScope and Drive-In Asylum; and for the pop culture websites When It Was Cool and Uphill Both Ways. He is also one of the hosts of When It Was Cool’s exclusive Uphill Both Ways podcast and can occasionally be heard as a cohost on Gruesome Magazine’s Decades of Horror: The Classic Era podcast.

Director Christopher Wilcha’s fast-paced documentary Flipside should hit home with anyone who has ever been involved in any type of creative work, from filmmaking to writing to any other type of art. In Flipside, he takes into stock a wide variety of projects that meant a lot to him that he never had the chance to finish, for a variety of reasons.

A film about Wilcha’s personal life as much as his professional one(s), Flipside takes viewers on a journey from the director’s subversive first full-time job working for Columbia House, during which he made his first documentary, the well-received The Target Shoots First (2000). Although it seemed like a career in documentary filmmaking was in the offing, life, as it does, got in the way, including a marriage and children leading to needing steady payment. Wilcha once again found himself working in advertising, filming commercials when not working on projects that never seemed to get finished.

A main focus of Flipside is Wilcha’s second attempt at trying to help Flipside Record Store in Pompton Lakes, New Jersey — where he worked as a high-schooler — survive in a world that has passed the shop and its owner Dan Dondiego by. Refusing to take Flipside online in any form nor to organize the cluttered business — along with facing new competition from a tightly run store nearby — Dondiego’s plight causes Wilcha to reassess his own inability to let go of the past.

Flipside incorporates footage from some of Wilcha’s unfinished projects, including a profile of the late jazz photographer Herman Leonard, who knew he was dying at the time, and a document of Starlee Kine’s attempt to get over writer’s block to work on a book. Coeditors Claire Ave’Lallemant and Joe Beshenkovsky work some serious magic as they take Flipside viewers on a brisk, back-and-forth ride through Wilcha’s life.

There’s much more to Wilcha’s story, and I’ll leave that for viewers to experience for themselves. It’s a highly relatable one to me, and I’m sure to many others, as well. Flipside will put a few lumps in your throat, some smiles on your face, and some existential questions about your own life in your mind. 

Flipside screens as part of the 2024 Calgary Underground Film Festival, which runs April 18–28. For more information, visit https://www.calgaryundergroundfilm.org/.