Orwell 2+2=5
Revisiting Orwell in the Age of Disinformation
When Raoul Peck sat down with Democracy Now! to discuss his latest film Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5, the conversation felt less like a promotional interview and more like a warning. The Haitian-born filmmaker, best known for I Am Not Your Negro and Exterminate All the Brutes, has built a reputation for connecting history’s lessons to the fractures of the present. In this new documentary, Peck turns to George Orwell—the author who, decades ago, foresaw the manipulation of truth as the ultimate political weapon.
Peck explains that he never intended Orwell to be a traditional biography. Instead, he uses Orwell’s final years—when the writer was racing against time and illness to finish 1984—as a window into the bigger story of how societies control information and memory. “I don’t make biographies,” Peck told Democracy Now! “I choose a moment in the life of a character that allows me to tell the bigger story.”
That story, as Peck sees it, begins in the British Empire’s colonies. Orwell’s early years as a policeman in Burma gave him a firsthand view of oppression and hierarchy. Peck highlights that period as formative: it taught Orwell how systems of power are maintained not only by force, but by the quiet acceptance of lies. The director quotes Orwell’s own reflection—“I was part of the actual machinery of despotism”—to show how personal experience shaped his political insight.
Peck insists that the “playbook of authoritarianism” Orwell described is not a relic of the past. “We are living again and again the same playbook,” he said, noting how the mechanisms of control repeat in Europe, Latin America, Africa, and the United States. Producer Alex Gibney, who joined Peck for the interview, drew an explicit parallel between Orwell’s slogan “2 + 2 = 5” and the behavior of modern leaders who attempt to redefine truth itself. “What you instinctively know to be true,” Gibney observed, “is upended by the authoritarian leader—everything flows from him.”
For Peck, that erosion of truth begins with the corruption of language. “When you cannot trust language anymore,” he warned, “you’re not in a democracy.” His film blends narration by Damian Lewis with Orwell’s own writing, archival footage, and modern imagery to show how words can be twisted into tools of control—how “newspeak” has simply evolved into algorithms and media manipulation.
Asked whether he feels hopeful, Peck paused. “Hopeful is not a word I can function with,” he said quietly. “What do you do once you see that something is not functioning?” The film, he explained, is not meant to reassure; it is meant to awaken.
Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5 premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival to critical acclaim, with many reviewers calling it one of Peck’s most urgent works. It’s less about nostalgia for Orwell’s warnings and more about recognizing that his nightmare vision has already arrived—and that the first step to resisting it is to see it clearly.
