Hello Reader,

Fifteen years ago, Sally Potter's film Rage premiered at the Berlinale in Competition. It's been virtually impossible to see since...but it's premiering on Instagram this week!

Rage was designed to be watched in real-time installments over the course of a week on social media. If you followed the Norwegian series Skam when it aired, its daily installments released throughout the week resemble what Potter does in Rage, only she was already doing it 6 years earlier.

In Rage, a 12-year-old boy named Michelangelo goes behind the scenes of a New York fashion show, in which an accident on the catwalk turns into a murder investigation. The film consists of a series of brief interviews he conducts with various participants in the show, and later the police investigator (David Oyelowo) on his mobile phone. That means that every character in the film is self-consciously performing for the camera and for Michelangelo, making this a sharp investigation of how we present ourselves.

Much of the action takes place off-screen, which means Potter fills in a lot of the blanks with sound.

Today is Day 4 (of 7) of Rage. I've been watching from the start, and I'm finding it compulsively watchable. You simply couldn't get the same experience if you tried to watch this as a feature film. Part of the fun is being able to cut people short if they're boring you, watch segments on repeat, and feel like you're involved in the story as it unfolds over a number of days. Watching it on Instagram also makes you even more conscious of the way the characters are performing for you.

As always with a Sally Potter film, the cast is absolutely stacked with talent. There are actors who were major stars back in 2009, like Judi Dench, Bob Balaban, Steve Buscemi, Eddie Izzard, Jude Law, and Dianne Wiest. Potter also cast a number of then-relative-unknowns who have since become hugely famous: Riz Ahmed (before The Reluctant Fundamentalist), Patrick J. Adams (before Suits), David Oyelowo (after Spooks/MI5, but before Selma), and Jacob Cedergren (before The Guilty).

Sally Potter on Rage

Here is part of Sally Potter's statement on the film:

“Rage is an exploration of the burgeoning power of social media and the generational divide between those born into a digital world and fluent with its rapidly evolving forms, and those for whom it remains a dark, opaque art.

The setting – the competitive, narcissistic, and economically unstable world of fashion with its hangers-on, critics, models, dressers, seamstresses, and publicists – is an atmosphere made chaotic by the feeding frenzy of celebrity. But it is also a world in which, despite appearances to the contrary, each individual grapples with insecurity and private terror.”

​There is an excellent interview with Potter on the film on her website here.​

How to watch Rage

​Stream it in real time on Instagram. Installments drop throughout the day every day until Feb 29.

It's unclear whether Potter intends to keep the film online after it's "aired" or if you'll need to catch up before the end of the week or risk missing!

You can also rent the whole film on Vimeo worldwide.

On Thursday, February 29, when the Instagram release is completed, there will be a Q&A with Sally Potter and the cast streamed live on Instagram from the Rio Cinema in Hackney

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