Orwell: 2+2 = 5

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. 1984 is 2025. In the late 1940s, on the Scottish island of Jura and in the grip of tuberculosis, George Orwell feverishly penned what would become his last – and most lasting – novel: Nineteen Eighty-Four. Despite the book’s obvious real-world catalysts, there is no way that Orwell could have known, as he wrote his fictional clarion call against totalitarianism, quite how eerily prescient his words would become. “To begin with,” he wrote, protagonist Winston Smith “did not know with any certainty that this was 1984”. Returning to Cannes after sharing the L' Œil d'Or last year for Ernest Cole: Lost and Found (MIFF 2024), Raoul Peck is not the first to prosecute the case that our present reality is a little too similar to Orwell’s imagined future. But with his latest documentary, he uses the author’s own words – read by Damian Lewis and juxtaposed against contemporary real-world imagery – to seal our Orwellian fate. Ostensibly a biography of the book, and of its author’s political and moral awakenings as well as his final days, Orwell: 2+2=5 doubles as a searingly defiant polemic against the rise and spread of contemporary fascism. “Brilliant … the boldest documentary anyone could make right now.” – TIME