CITY Screen, York is taking part in the world’s first interactive multi-cinema film premiere on Thursday, when Rage will be shown in a live digital screening at 8.30pm.

York actress Dame Judi Dench is joined in Sally Potter’s cast by Jude Law, Eddie Izzard, Steve Buscemi, Dianne Wiest, John Leguizamo and model turned Oxbridge student, actress, whatever, Lily Cole.

Thursday’s film premiere will take place at the BFI Southbank in London, from where it will be broadcast via satellite to digital cinemas across Britain, including City Screen.

Audiences at the cinemas outside London will see all the red-carpet ceremonials and can participate in the interactive question-and-answer session with Sally Potter and members of her cast after the screening, asking their questions by SMS or Skype directly from their mobile phones.

This interactive event ties in with the themes of Potter’s film, wherein Michelangelo, the unseen protagonist, causes a riot at a fashion show by using his mobile phone to organise a “flash mob”. Defying the usual conventions of film, Rage (cert 15) employs a radical narrative structure that focuses entirely on individual performances to build a tragicomic portrait of people persuaded to reveal their secrets in the midst of a crisis.

The ground-breaking film consists wholly of a dynamic series of intimately filmed interviews, as if shot by a schoolboy on his mobile phone, as he goes behind-the-scenes at a New York fashion show during seven days when an accident on the catwalk turns into a murder investigation. Fourteen actors, both celebrated stars and emerging talents, play fashion-world characters who each have a role in the show, from the designer (Simon Abkarian) and his models (Cole and Law), through the fashion critic (Dame Judi) and the photographer (Buscemi), to the seamstress (Adriana Barraza) and the fashion-house financier (Izzard) and his bodyguard (Leguizamo).

As they start to confide in the unseen schoolboy with his phone camera, their personal truths surface and the reality of the events taking place off screen slowly unravel.

Writer/director Sally Potter spent two days with each actor, shooting the characters’ interviews against a blue screen, with only herself behind the camera and a sound recordist. In another first for the pioneering Rage, the 95-minute film will be premiered by Babelgum as an episodic mobile release for iPhone and iPod devices from Monday, making it the first feature-length film to receive its premiere on mobile phones.

The film also will be released online via Babelgum and on DVD through Adventure Pictures on September 28. For more details, visit ragethemovie.com * For tickets, phone 0871 704 2054 or book online at picturehouses.co.uk