Raoul Peck’s scary new documentary applies Orwell’s warnings to right now

No one goes to Cannes expecting to be frightened by a film about a long-dead British writer. Unless, of course, that writer is George Orwell.

When Raoul Peck’s documentary “Orwell: 2+2=5” premiered at the festival in May, the crowd reacted with the startled tension of a horror screening — gasps, murmurs, a few cries — before finally breaking into thunderous applause.

What they saw on screen felt both familiar and terrifyingly current. Peck builds the film entirely from Orwell’s words, delivered in a low, steady burn by actor Damian Lewis (“Billions”), repositioning the dying author of “Nineteen Eighty-Four” in his final tubercular days on the Scottish Isle of Jura, into today’s world. His vision of power, propaganda and language as a weapon meets a barrage of torn-from-the-news imagery: refugees adrift on boats, authoritarian leaders twisting the truth, AI hallucinations blurring what’s left of reality. The film, to be released nationwide on Friday by Neon, plays less like a documentary than a séance in which Orwell’s ghost watches his own warnings play out: urgent, relentless, immersive as a nightmare.

Peck says the Cannes reception didn’t surprise him.

“I knew it would touch a nerve,” Peck, 72, says over Zoom from New York. His calm, French-accented voice — he’s based in Paris but travels frequently — carries the quiet fatigue of someone who’s spent decades watching history repeat itself. “It’s not just a problem of the U.S. — it’s everywhere. We have all sorts of bullies and there’s no reliable sheriff in town. Even the most powerful institutions are on shaky ground. I knew the film would either break people or energize them. If you’re a normal citizen, a normal human being, you must ask yourself questions when you come out of it.”

There are no talking heads in Peck’s film, no experts spelling out the relevance of an author who died in 1950. Instead, he draws from the writer’s letters and diaries, as well as the longer-form works like the barnyard political allegory “Animal Farm” and the dystopian novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four.” He also weaves in fragments from past screen adaptations of Orwell’s titles, including the 1954 animated “Animal Farm” and Michael Radford’s stark, desaturated adaptation of “Nineteen Eighty-Four” starring John Hurt, cross-cutting them with current images of drone wars, surveillance and algorithmic control.

“Raoul has been unbelievably thorough,” says narrator Lewis via Zoom from his home in London, where he regularly rides his bike past one of Orwell’s former residences. “The film is dense in the best way, thick with ideas and images. You come out of it feeling like you’ve been through something important.”

Lewis, who delivers Orwell’s words with a steely intensity that builds toward alarm, says his warnings have only grown more pressing.

“I read recently that about 37% of countries in the world are now categorized as not free,” he adds. “That’s getting dangerously close to half the planet. What Raoul’s film captures — and what Orwell saw so clearly — is how authoritarian ideas don’t arrive overnight. They creep up on us, little by little, as words like ‘democracy’ get redefined to mean whatever those in power want them to mean.”

Peck’s filmmaking has long blurred the line between art and activism. Born in Haiti, he fled with his family from François Duvalier’s dictatorship in 1961 and grew up in what was then the Republic of the Congo (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), where his father worked for the United Nations. After studying engineering and economics in Berlin, he returned home to serve as Haiti’s minister of culture in the 1990s. His breakthrough, the Oscar-nominated 2016 film “I Am Not Your Negro,” channeled James Baldwin’s words to examine race and power in America and the country’s uneasy reckoning with its past. He continued that exploration in HBO’s “Exterminate All the Brutes” (2021), tracing the myths of empire and white supremacy that shape the modern world.

“If I can’t mix politics and art, I probably wouldn’t make a project,” Peck says. “That’s what Orwell himself said — ‘Animal Farm’ was the first time he was really trying to link politics with art. And that’s what I’ve been trying to do all my life as a filmmaker.”

Few writers have been more quoted — or misquoted — than Orwell. Decades after coining ideas such as Newspeak (state-controlled language) and doublethink (the ability to hold two contradictory beliefs at once), he’s been claimed by every side: Fear-mongering politicians cite him, pundits weaponize him, partisans wield “Orwellian” as shorthand for whatever offends them most. Even President Trump recently praised Orwell in the same breath as Shakespeare and Dickens at a state banquet at Windsor Castle.

Asked what Orwell would make of that, Peck gives a small, mirthless laugh.

“He would probably faintly smile,” he says. “Because that’s exactly what he wrote about — how thought corrupts language and language corrupts thought. We’re living doublespeak now in an exponential way, the bully using the words of justice and peace while bombing people at the same moment. It’s so absurd. That’s why I feel so close to him. Coming from Haiti, I learned very early that what politicians were saying never matched my reality.”

George Orwell, author of “1984” and “Animal Farm,” whose warnings about power and language echo through the timely documentary “Orwell: 2+2=5.”

(Associated Press)

Peck came to the project warily. “Honestly, I wasn’t sure I wanted to touch Orwell,” he admits. “Where I come from, Orwell had been turned into a kind of Cold War mascot.” Raised under Mobutu Sese Seko’s U.S.-backed regime in what became Zaire and later educated in America and Europe, he was keenly aware of how Orwell’s legacy had been co-opted, from the CIA’s funding of the 1954 animated “Animal Farm” to the deployment of his books as Cold War propaganda.

“That was not something that interested me,” Peck says. “I grew up deconstructing everything I was getting from the West, including Hollywood movies.”

Then came a call from his friend, Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker and producer Alex Gibney (“Taxi to the Dark Side”), who was involved with a project that had secured the rights to Orwell’s complete body of work and wanted Peck to direct it.

“How could I say no?” he recalls. “For a filmmaker like me, who loves to dig deep into someone’s mind and work, it was an incredible gift.”

What Peck found wasn’t a prophet or a symbol but a man full of contradictions: a writer wrestling with class, illness and empire, trying to fuse politics and art before his own time ran out. That realization deepened when he came across a photograph of Orwell as a baby in the arms of his Indian nanny, a white child of the British Empire cradled by the colonized woman charged with his care. Born into what he called the “lower-upper-middle class,” Orwell gradually recognized his own complicity in the system he opposed and came to despise his role as a kind of middle manager in the machinery of oppression.

“His own biography — born in India, sent to Burma as a young soldier, doing what he did there and being ashamed of it — drew him closer to my own experience,” Peck says. “We were from the same world. We saw the same things.”

To embody Orwell, Peck turned to Lewis, also known for “Band of Brothers” and “Homeland.”

“I knew I was telling a story, not making a traditional documentary,” Peck says. “So I needed a great British actor, someone with real stage experience. I knew Damian could bring the presence I wanted — to be Orwell, not imitate him. That was the main direction I gave him: to work from the interior.”

“If we don’t bring rules around AI very rapidly, we won’t be able to put the paste back in the tube,” says filmmaker Raoul Peck. “AI is an instrument and should stay an instrument. That means we’re using it. It’s not using us.”

(Justin Jun Lee / For The Times)

Lewis, who had previously voiced Orwell for the international Talking Statues project — an app that lets passersby scan a QR code to hear historical figures “speak” — approached the feature-length performance with similar restraint.

“His language, the rhythm of his prose, dictates the rhythm of delivery,” he says. “Raoul was very clear that it should sound intimate and conversational, not overly formal. That’s what we tried to aim for — something direct, specific, detailed and personal.”

Much of “Orwell: 2+2=5” unfolds like a fever dream, Orwell’s words colliding with scenes from the present, including bombed-out streets in Gaza and Ukraine. “There were too many conflicts to include,” Peck says. “So I had to find the connections — what repeats, how bodies are treated, how power behaves.”

In one of the film’s most charged moments, Peck turns Orwell’s warning about political language into a montage of modern euphemisms: “peacekeeping operations,” “collateral damage,” “illegals” — and then, pointedly, “antisemitism 2024.” He knows the inclusion is provocative but says that’s the point: to show how words can be twisted or emptied of meaning, including in debates over Israel’s war in Gaza.

“Every word is precise,” Peck says. “I don’t say the Jews, I don’t say Israel, I say the Israeli administration. But even then, there’s a reflex — you can’t touch this.”

At Cannes, that moment drew applause. One of Peck’s closest friends — a Jewish writer who, he notes, agrees with him on nearly everything politically — told him later that while she was deeply moved by the film, she’d felt a jolt of fear as the audience clapped.

“We talked about it,” Peck says. “In France today, you can’t touch that term. And for me, that’s the beginning of the end — when you can’t speak your mind.”

He recalls being in New York after 9/11, unable to voice unease about the flag-waving and rush to war. “I cried like everybody else,” he says. “But when, after five days, you’re asked to wave a flag, that’s using your humanity for war. The point is the same — to shut down conversation.”

Peck carries Orwell’s warning into the digital present. The writer’s words play against AI-generated images and voices, echoes of the future he once imagined.

“He wrote about it without knowing it would be called AI,” Peck says. “He said someday you’d be able to write whole books and newspapers with artificial intelligence — exactly what’s happening now.”

For Peck, the technology is the next front in the battle over truth and power. In his film, every AI-generated sound, image and piece of music is clearly labeled with onscreen text.

“There should be transparency about that,” he says. “If we don’t bring rules around AI very rapidly, we won’t be able to put the paste back in the tube. Profit is the only guideline right now — nobody’s controlling its impact, not on energy, not on children, not on schools. AI is an instrument and should stay an instrument. That means we’re using it. It’s not using us.”

Even as “Orwell: 2+2=5” reaches theaters, Peck is already working on two new documentaries, including one about the 2021 assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse.

“It’s an incredible geopolitical mess,” he says. “Every day I discover more. I need to go back to fiction for a while — documentaries are exhausting. But I can’t complain. I wish everyone could be as passionate about their work as I am.”

For all its darkness, Peck insists on leaving a sliver of light. He points to Orwell’s line in “Nineteen Eighty-Four”: “If there is hope, it lies in the proles.”

“The civil society is always the one who saved the day — the civilians, the students, the churches, the alliances,” he says. “Like the civil rights movement. Blacks, Jews, whites, churches, everybody sat down around the table and decided to have a strategy. And unfortunately, that’s the only thing we have. It’s long and it’s hard, but that door is still open. It’s us, individually and collectively, who have to make that choice.”

What keeps him going, he says, isn’t optimism so much as duty.

“If I lived completely engulfed in my own bubble, I’d probably be desperate,” he says. “What keeps me grounded is that I still have friends in Congo. I still work with Haiti every day. I talk with journalists who risk their lives in Gaza. So I can’t afford to look at those people and say, ‘I’m tired.’ They’re still doing the work.”

He pauses, his voice tightening. “People laugh at the latest stupidity from the president, as if it’s funny,” he says. “But that’s a dictatorship coming. He’s attacking every institution — newspapers, academia, justice, business. It’s the same playbook. They change the laws first, because most people would rather obey the law than say ‘No, two plus two equals four.’ That’s what authoritarian leaders count on.”

He sits quietly for a moment. “People are waiting for miracles,” he says finally. “But there are no miracles.”