Given his background as a child refugee from Haiti’s brutal Duvalier dictatorship, it’s no surprise that Raoul Peck’s career has a filmmaker has centered on socio-political issues. His latest film, Orwell 2 + 2 = 5 centers on George Orwell, the visionary author of 1984 and Animal Farm. In the years since Orwell died in 1950, the term “Orwellian,” has come to describe totalitarian and authoritarian political and social practices.
Done in cooperation with the Orwell estate, Raoul Peck has effectively blended a portrait of George Orwell with a disturbing analysis of autocracy’s appeal throughout the world. Narrated by actor Damian Lewis, Orwell’s own words, culled from letters, journals and published works, are used to describe life events that would shape his writing. Various photos of Orwell taken at different times of his life are sprinkled throughout.
Raoul Peck interweaves clips from raw footage, interviews, newsreels, documentaries, movies and TV shows to create a sense of realism and point out similarities found in the modern world. Examples including Nazi Germany, Stalin’s Russia and more recent examples such as Putin’s Russia and the events in Ukraine only prove how scary the threat of totalitarianism can be. Peck also uses AI—another technical advance that could help advance autocratic causes—to drive home the point that people and media can easily be manipulated.
Published in 1949, 1984 is scarier now than it was then. Given the increase of cameras virtually anywhere and the rise of devices like Alexa and Google Home devices, it could be argued that we are now being watched constantly. Further, Peck highlights how big businesses and wealthy individuals are using totalitarian practices to fund politicians to achieve their sometimes nefarious goals. Raoul Peck intersperses excerpts from big tech moguls discussing privacy and surveillance issues and allowing Big Brother to watch us in ways Orwell could have never imagined.
Despite it all, Orwell: 2+2=5 closes on a surprisingly hopeful note, with a shot of George Orwell as a baby and his Indian nanny with the narration, “My chief hope for the future is that the common people have never parted company with their moral code.”
English SDH, French, Spanish subtitles are included.
No extras are available.