Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck, known for his documentary ‘I Am Not Your Negro’, has turned his lens to George Orwell in a new film that connects the author’s warnings to contemporary political figures like Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. Peck, who gained unprecedented access to Orwell’s archives, says he initially dismissed Orwell as a science-fiction writer but came to see him as a fellow crusader for truth.
Peck’s film, titled ‘2+2=5’, uses Orwell’s own words—voiced by actor Damian Lewis—drawn largely from the diary he kept before his death in 1950. The documentary interweaves scenes from adaptations of ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ with modern political slogans, such as Russia’s ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine, and footage of Chinese troops, Iraqi war scenes, and speeches by Narendra Modi.
Growing up under the Duvalier dictatorship in Haiti, Peck says he experienced ‘newspeak’ firsthand. ‘I grew up with newspeak. I basically had to deconstruct everything around me,’ he explains. Peck’s own biography—fleeing Haiti, studying in multiple countries, and working as a taxi driver and journalist—shaped his worldview, making Orwell’s anti-imperialist stance resonate deeply.
‘I discovered an Orwell from the third world,’ Peck says. ‘He went back to Burma as a 20-year-old and discovered colonialism, and then went to fight the Spanish civil war. That’s what young people did in the world I come from. We fight for truth, we fight for justice.’ The film premieres amid growing concerns about authoritarianism globally, drawing direct lines from Orwell’s dystopian vision to today’s political landscape.
