Jason Dick (Roll Call, 8 October 2025) speaks to Haitian-born director Raoul Peck about his forthcoming documentary film, Orwell: 2+2=5. ‘He was not writing about some sort of future republic,’ the Oscar-nominated filmmaker says. [Many thanks to Peter Jordens for bringing this item to our attention.]
Orwell: 2+2=5 (Written and directed by Raoul Peck, 2026. Rated R. 1 hour 59 minutes)
See trailer here:
Here are excerpts from the article and interview (see full article at Roll Call):
George Orwell is so iconic that he has his own adjective, but his classic dystopian novel almost didn’t make it to completion.
“He’s trying to finish ‘1984,’ it’s the last year of his life, and he’s in and out of hospitals, sanatoriums. He doesn’t know if he will finish,” says filmmaker Raoul Peck.
That’s the struggle that anchors Peck’s latest documentary, “Orwell: 2+2=5,” as the British writer races against tuberculosis to publish his chilling vision of doublethink, thoughtcrimes and memory holes before his death at age 46.
For Peck, that’s only half the story. Scenes from Orwell’s life blend together with grim footage of our own time, from the battlefields of Ukraine to the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. “The mistake during the Cold War that people made is [thinking] he wrote exclusively against the Soviet Union or Stalinism,” Peck says. “In fact, he was writing down the very matrix of how an authoritarian developed. What are the signs? What is the language? What are the structures?”
Those questions are familiar to Peck, whose family fled Haiti during the François Duvalier regime. “When you have lived in a dictatorship, you recognize those signs very early on,” he says.
Jason Dick: When did Orwell first come into your world?
Raoul Peck: Of course I read “1984” in school, and “Animal Farm” as well. But Orwell was always a very far away character for me. I’m from Haiti, and then I grew up in Congo under Mobutu. My father was arrested in Haiti twice, and then he had to leave because he knew that the dictatorship would come after him.
But when I started to immerse myself in this project, I slowly discovered a different Orwell that was closer to my own reality. And I also profoundly understood that, in fact, he was not writing about some sort of future republic. He was talking about his own experience volunteering at 19 to become a policeman in Burma. He was confronted with the colonial forces, and he was on the bad side, and he recognized that.
And that brought me closer to him because he did a very humble thing of writing about it in the 1930s, when a lot of African countries were still colonized. There were a lot of dictatorships around the world, but he admitted what he did there, and he was not proud of it, and he criticized his home country about what they were doing in Burma and in India. And so I learned a new Orwell, and that allowed me to make a much more organic and intimate film. [. . .]
JD: How does this compare with your film about James Baldwin, “I Am Not Your Negro”?
RP: When you’ve never left your country, everything else is sort of obscure, sometimes savage territory. But these men left their own country and learned to know who the “other” is, who are the foreigners, who are the immigrants, who are the illegals, as you would use today as a word, and that changed them. They start reflecting on who they are as a human being, and they start seeing the “other” as fellow human beings. [. . .]
For full article and interview, see https://rollcall.com/2025/10/08/how-director-raoul-peck-found-a-new-orwell
Jason Dick (Roll Call, 8 October 2025) speaks to Haitian-born director Raoul Peck about his forthcoming documentary film, Orwell: 2+2=5. ‘He was not writing about some sort of future republic,’ the Oscar-nominated filmmaker says. [Many thanks to Peter Jordens for bringing this item to our attention.] Orwell: 2+2=5 (Written and directed by Raoul Peck, 2026.
