Recommendations of the Editorial team
When he was 19 years old – still light years away from essays, novels and the pseudonym that was supposed to give him literary immortality – Eric Arthur Blair moved to the east and joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma. At that time, the country was still under British colonial rule – “an outpost of the Empire” – and the young man was stationed around rangun in various cities.
There, Blair began to recognize how the authorities in this occupied area acted with the stated goal of securing cultural dominance and keeping the local population under the knute of their majesty. He not only began to despise violence that he and his colleagues had. But also to recognize that “you have to be part of it to hate imperialism. But it is not possible to be part of such a system without recognizing it as an illegible tyranny.” Unlike in England, there was no upper and lower class. There were only oppressors and oppressed.
After the veil had ventilated from his eyes, Blair finally left the service. He published a book about his experiences as part of “the actual apparatus of the despotie”: “Burmese Days”. Together with the semi-journalistic “Down and Out in Paris and London”, in which he described a self-experiment in extreme poverty, the former police officer began to make a name for himself as an author. Or rather a pseudonym. Because when he became a literary, Blair took a new name – George Orwell.
Raoul Peck’s cinematic method
Raoul Peck’s “Orwell: 2+2 = 5” dedicates this chapter in the life of the author short but decisive passages. Complemented by faded photos and Orwell’s prose, read by Damian Lewis. (The director does not care not to call these sound tracks as a voice-over, since the mere sober explanations would imply. He prefers to speak of “performances”. Like Samuel L. Jackson in Peck’s “I am not your Negro”, Lewis’ scratchy interpretation is less a lecture than a key moment in the life of the writer and receives and gets and gets The classic documentary 101 frame: Here Orwell was radicalized by empathy. Another step towards the sharp chronicler of misery, humanity and his time.
An American American Masters version of this artist portrait would now simply continue chronologically. A “from the cradle to the grave” tour. Introduced by a photo of the Baby Orwell in the arm of his Indian Nanny. But Peck begins to show scenes today’s turmoil in Myanmar. Dissidents are beaten and arrested. Propaganda stirs up chaos, government language justifies “pacification” – one of many euphemisms for state -sanctioned brutality. (Further examples: “vocational training centers”, “lawful use of violence”, or a US government that uses “anti-Semitism” to censorship of criticism of universities.) Past and the present merge. History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes. We have always waged war against oceania.
The present meets Orwell
Soon other focal points mingle into the film: Ukraine, Gaza, January 6th. Contemporary leaders and aspiring totalitarian regimes collide on Ralph Steadman’s caricatures for an edition of “Animal Farm” and excerpts from three films by “1984”, Orwell’s most famous work. Peck uses the slogans of the “Ministry of Truth” – “War is peace”, “Freedom is slavery”, “ignorance is strength” – as chapter headings. This is followed by assemblies by arrested journalists, pisting billionaires, disempowering and monopolization of the media, a reality that is kidnapped and distorted. “The concept of an objective truth disappears from this world,” Orwell wrote in 1946 in his essay “Why I Write”. These words are a central leitmotif of the film – and today both sobering and terrifyingly up to date. We don’t have to ask ourselves what Orwell would have thought about our present. He has already written it.
Orwell for the 21st century
After a short time it becomes clear that “Orwell: 2+2 = 5” not only portrays a writer of the 20th century, but also dissected the authoritarianism of the 21st century. Peck links historical and current scenes in a monumental collage-similar to its multi-layered colonialism essay “Exterminate All Brutes” from 2021.
The result looks like “Doomscrolling: The Film”. But it also shows that Orwell not only denounced his time or temporary grievances. He understood how power works – and which agents, parties and dictators use to secure them. The methods may change, the channels of the disinformation and the general “worse improvement” of the world too. But the mechanisms remain the same.
Peck has created politically precise feature films, documentary and documentary rams for decades – from his biopic to Patrice Lumumba (2000) to his unsurpassed portrait James Baldwins (“I am not your Negro”). With this new work, the Haitian filmmaker not only provides an irreplaceable contemporary witness, but also by far the most terrifying film in 2025.
But the film is clever enough not to fuck false hopes. In the end, when the photo of Orwell and his Nanny is shown again, it is clear that this child would devote its life to the fight against indifference and emphasize empathy as a necessity – not as a luxury. The writer was looking for a way to overcome his own entanglement into a corrupt system. The film inspires us to do the same.