Royal College of Art Innovation Night

October 2013

Innovation Night 2013, the fourth of five annual lectures sponsored by The Rumi Foundation, was held on 29th October 2013. Joining us as guest speaker was Sally Potter OBE.

Sally Potter made her first 8mm film at the age of fourteen. However, it was not until her 1992 internationally acclaimed and multi-award winning film, Orlando, a bold adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s classic novel, that Potter’s work was brought to a wider audience. It was followed by The Tango Lesson in 1996 and The Man Who Cried in 2000 starring Christina Ricci, Johnny Depp and Cate Blanchett. In 2009, Rage, starring Dame Judi Dench and Jude Law, was the first film to premiere simultaneously in cinemas and on mobile phones.

Her newest film, Ginger & Rosa, was released in 2012 and centered on two young girls in the 1970s who play truant together, discussing religion, politics and hairstyles, and dream of lives bigger than their mothers’ frustrated domesticity.

Potter has also launched SP-ARK (www.sp-ark.org), an interactive online project based on the multi-media archive of her works. SP-ARK invites viewers to understand every aspect of a film production, from the initial idea through screenwriting, budgeting and casting to the composition of an individual shot.