Angélina Ferreira

The creators and stars of Menace, from left: Devon Carson, Sarah Alò, and Flavia Borges

Before the three main characters of the new video series Menace speak a single word, their phones buzz with an emergency alert: "Females seek shelter immediately. Attack in your area." One thousand women in Chicago have been killed by a group of radical men's rights activists, jokingly called GuySIS. Our heroes find themselves holed up in a tiny apartment, forced to rely on women they barely know for survival. And the whole story is told in 13 one-minute episodes on Instagram. "It's about sisterhood," says Devon Carson, 33, one of the show's creators and stars. "It's about the struggles and the failures and the successes brought out of necessity and growing bonds and becoming close through process. I think [sisterhood] is huge both in real life in what really happened, and also in what we wrote." Carson, Flavia Borges, 31, and Sarah Alò, 27, were practically strangers when they decided to collaborate. All three women were tired of relying on all-male crews to execute their creative visions. As a team they've spent the last year exploring different feminist perspectives, challenging themselves with a constrained format, and imagining the worst-case scenario of a present-day attack on women's rights. The result of that process is Menace, premiering on Instagram at @MenaceSeries on Thursday, November 9. The series portrays financial dominatrix Daisy (Carson), illegal immigrant Ana (Borges), and domestic abuse survivor Jane (Alò) all reacting to a nationwide femicide while also dealing with body-image issues, race, sexuality, intersectionality, sex-worker stereotypes, beauty standards, and feminist ideals. And these three extremely different women have to learn to accept each other, acknowledge their own flaws, and come together as a force to counteract the building threat against womanhood. The creators wanted each character to reflect a conflicting duality they experience in their own lives. On one end, there's the effort to uphold feminist ideals; on the other, their habits of judging other women, defending problematic men, and further actions that are often frowned upon in the scope of the sisterhood. Every act of strength is followed by a distinctly nonfeminist action. "Our instincts and emotions might not match the logical thing that we're supposed to think or feel or believe," Carson says. "When we were writing these characters, we didn't want them to be perfect feminist icons. That doesn't exist." When Jane, the domestic abuse survivor, is first introduced, she's portrayed as having made sacrifices to protect herself and become self-sufficient. But Daisy and Ana soon discover that she's the poster child for white privilege. "I was really excited to write Jane as a white feminist, as someone who doesn't get intersectionality," Alò says. "I thought it was important to force that type of woman into a situation where she can't just look away and pretend what's happening isn't real or that there aren't still inequalities between women. I was trying to be able to be compassionate to her while also keeping her accountable for the ways in which she has inadvertently caused inequality in her own life."

OFFICIAL TRAILER for our new original web series MENACE. Coming to Instagram Fall 2017. Is the future still female? #trailer #premiere #webseries #menaceseries 🚺 🎥 A post shared by MENACE a new microseries (@menaceseries) on Jul 20, 2017 at 6:35pm PDT

It's a lot to pack into 13 minutes on a social media platform. But the claustrophobia serves the story. Most of the series takes place in a cramped apartment, made to feel even smaller by the dimensions of Instagram on a cell phone. The setting forces the women to confront each other. And the limitations served as a quality checkpoint during the writing process—within that 13 minutes not one second is wasted. "I think it always helps to have constraints," Carson says. "Everything gets chopped, but it's good because then you really pick out the chunks that are important, simplify everything." When Carson, Borges, and Alò first collaborated, the possibilities were boundless. There were no scripts, no set visions, and no expectations, just a group of women who wanted to express their points of view without a male perspective sneaking its way into the creative process. Borges was the glue that connected everyone. As an actor, she found herself being cast only in roles that relied on her sexuality. She wanted to explore her history as an immigrant and woman of color, and began work on a screenplay. But she found the process extremely isolating. She wanted feedback on her work from other women, and she reached out to Alò and Carson, two of the very few female artists she crossed paths with in creative workshops and classes in Chicago. Borges remembers being impressed with Carson's ability to pull amazing performances out of actors as a director during local filmmaker meetups. And after Borges met Alò in a Second City class, the former was inspired by a video sketch that the latter wrote and directed called "Love at First Catcall." "When I wrote that sketch, the whole group of people that I actually wrote and produced it with were men," Alò says. "When Flavia approached me, I was definitely supereager to write with women. Also, her perspective on it was not just that we would be creating and writing, but that we would be hiring a female crew and get it as much out of the hands of men as possible." In fact, the only time a male actor appears in the series, all you can see is his hands—in the credits the character is simply called "faceless man." More than 75 percent of the production crew is female. When Carson, Borges, and Alò finally started working together, it was bumpy at first. Much like the characters they ended up writing, they were forced to confront each other's flaws in an intimate environment and put their egos aside for the sake of a greater cause. "It's easy to get into that, 'Oh, we're besties! We get along so well all the time!' and it's the only way women can collaborate," Borges says. "That's not true. We can recognize our differences, understand each other and share that, and still have a partnership. We don't have to agree on everything. We're all different. That's what makes it so good." During the first few writing sessions, the trio couldn't even agree on a genre. Borges loved drama, Alò's work was mostly in comedic sketches, and Carson wanted to explore sci-fi and fantasy. Instead of fighting each other's instincts, they blended their strengths to create something that they never would have come up with as individuals: a dystopian fiction that's funny but also has very dark and dramatic moments.

Angélina Ferreira

Borges, Carson, and Alò fend off GuySIS, a radical men’s rights group, in Menace.