film

Orwell: 2+2=5 is a documentary by Raoul Peck, whose previous subjects include the assassinated Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba, Karl Marx and the writer James Baldwin, that revisits Nineteen Eighty-Four as a living political text rather than just a canonical text from the past. Peck approaches Orwell not as a prophet to be admired from afar but as a writer whose predictions and warnings have become concrete.

Blending readings from Orwell’s novel and essays with archival footage and contemporary media imagery, the film draws clear lines between the mechanisms of Orwell's Oceania and the present day: permanent war, mass surveillance, the corrosion of language and the weaponisation of lies.