Director's Works
Black Feminism and the Polycrisis Mac Premo and Adrianna Dufay
Mac Premo and Adrianna Dufay have directed and produced numerous, award-winning short-form videos for festivals, web and social media. TED’s series Small Thing, Big Idea won a 2019 Webby for Best Series and has been viewed over 20MM times. They have won over a dozen NY Emmy Awards, and recently a partnership with Jad Abumrad of RadioLab and Vanderbilt University won multiple 2024 ARLies, including Best in Show. They also won a joint Emmy for Outstanding Graphic Design and Art Direction for the Netflix documentary, A Trip to Infinity. Mac’s films and art have exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide, including The Brooklyn Museum, the Ringling Museum, PS1 MoMA and The New Museum. Mac and Adrianna were 2023 fellows of The New Institute in Hamburg, Germany. They live and work in Brooklyn with their two totally radical kids. And also their dog, Philomena.
Mac Premo and Adrianna Dufay spent the fall of 2023 as artists-in-residence and fellows at The New Institute in Hamburg. Germany. In meeting with several program chairs — both at the inception of the term and during their initial visit months earlier, Adrianna and Mac developed an interest in working with program Black Feminism and the Polycrisis (BF&TPC). Minna Salami, the BF&TPC program chair, approached Adrianna and Mac about creating a short film that would serve to explain what the Polycrisis is, and how Black Feminism is uniquely equipped to address its specific global affects. The stated purpose of this film was to create engaging and energetic short film quickly communicates the broader concepts of the program, and encourage informed conversation within the public arena through considered vocabulary. Additionally, the film was intended to act as an outreach to media outlets and academic institutions conducting further investigation into Black Feminism and the Polycrisis.
The initial step was for Adrianna, Mac, and Minna to condense the meaning and mission of the BF&TPC program into a communicable script. Minna identified the core concepts of the movement as interpreted by the program, and worked with Adrianna and Mac to author a series of interview questions. On camera interviews were then filmed by Mac. Those interviews were culled into an initial structure, which was then populated with metaphorical collage animation, stop-frame animated sculpture, b-roll of the BF&TPC conducting workshops and hosting events at The New Institute, and treated stock imagery. The process of hand-creating imagery specific to exact concepts communicated by the selected editorial moments of the fellows’ interviews enable the words and images of the film to syncopate with hyper-specificity. Additionally, the multilayered and hand-crafted film making technique reflected the interwoven complexity of the polycrisis, and the purposeful human touch intrinsic to Black Feminism.
The end result is a fast paced 4 minute film that energizes and informs, and most importantly whets the viewers appetite to further investigate the far-reaching tenets of Black Feminism, and it’s poignant capability as a vast philosophy specific to the tapestry of threat posed by polycrisis.
