Raoul Peck, the acclaimed documentary chronicler of power in America, looks to George Orwell’s writing of 1984 as a prescient guide to our modern era of Trumpian rule and reality manipulation.
A vital film… Peck offers a sobering reminder of what’s at stake in this technology-defined age of doublethink and thoughtcrime, the world that Orwell foresaw and we occupy.
Orwell: 2+2=5 2025
British writer George Orwell recognised that organised lying is a key tool for those who prop up authoritarian systems – the kind of people that will insist that two and two make five and force others to agree, if it allows them to cling to power and privilege. The ideas of his 1940s dystopian novels Animal Farm and 1984, which grew out of his own shame for participating firsthand in India’s imperial police machinery in Burma, had such an impact that “Orwellian” is now another word for repressive state control.
Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck (I Am Not Your Negro, NZIFF 2017) traces Orwell’s life and the evolution of his thought in a bold and confronting assemblage of movie clips and news footage that serves as a stark warning. The MAGA ideology of Donald Trump, his track record of demonstrably false claims and the January 6 storming of the Capitol, are astutely set in the wider context of murderous regimes throughout history and their similar warping of perceptions through language. Alongside the rise of social media at the hands of entrepreneurs with little regard for factchecking or AI regulation, Peck contends that truth is more fragile than ever and “Orwellian” the climate of the present. — Carmen Gray