With three shorts and two features released over the past three years, Jordan Tetewsky and Joshua Pikovsky may be eastern Massachusetts most prolific contemporary filmmakers. Focusing on low-stakes conflicts and working largely with non-actors, theirs is a cinema concerned with detail as much as drama. Their heroes are typically ambitionless outsiders, content with their lives yet rubbing against the grating presence of professional-minded family and friends. We see them often walking through beautiful environs, with no particular place to go, and yet filled with an ambient energy and meaning. With the aim of showcasing their second feature, BERMAN’S MARCH, we’re proud to host Tetewsky at Spectacle to present the film alongside their first feature, HANNAH HA HA.
BERMAN’S MARCH
dirs. Jordan Tetewsky and Joshua Pikovsky, 2023
USA. 71 min.
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 1 – 7:30PM – Followed by a Q&A with Jordan Tetewsky
A road movie for today’s depressed America, BERMAN’S MARCH follows the round trip journey of a contractor, Charlie (Charlie Robinson), who impulsively skips out on work to spend a week with his smarmy, upwardly-mobile highschool friends. Edited at a relaxed, yet compact, rhythm, Tetewsky and Pikovsky create a wry comic vision of an America filled with overly-sensitive yuppies, internet-famous gas stations, and endless radio chatter. It’s a vision of our country that feels too lived in to feel like mere social commentary and yet too bleak not to ring out as strikingly contemporary. Tetewsky, doing quadruple duty as co-writer, co-director, co-editor and cinematographer, brings a pictorial vision that is as sharp as ever, filling the image with arresting compositions and sumptuous portraiture that renders Charlie and his environs vividly tender with a note of distance. The result is a film that speaks in the familiar mode of ameri-indie naturalism without falling into the form’s cliches; finding its own idiosyncratic tone and sharp attention to detail.
HANNAH HA HA
dirs. Jordan Tetewsky and Joshua Pikovsky, 2022
USA. 76 min.
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 1 – 10:00PM – Followed by a Q&A with Jordan Tetewsky and star Hannah Lee Thompson
25 year old Hannah (Hannah Lee Thompson) is seemingly content with her life filled with odd jobs and plenty of free time. That is until her older, yuppie brother Paul (Producer Roger Mancusi) sends her on a job search after reminding her that when she turns 26 she’ll lose her parent’s health insurance. Working, as usual, largely with non-actors, Tetewsky and Pikovsky create an understated portrait of suburban Massachusetts suffused with American disaffection. Filmed through layers of gauze, the film has a hazy, soft-focus look that adds dimensions of ethereal beauty and overt cinematic pictorialism to the otherwise naturalistic aesthetic. Tetewsky and Pikovsky’s first feature, HANNAH HA HA went on to win the top prize at Slamdance 2022.