ORWELL : 2+2=5 © VELVET FILM
In Raoul Peck’s documentary, Orwell and 1984 are more relevant than ever
The documentary work of Raoul Peck is breaking new ground with Orwell: 2+2=5. This film, being presented at Cannes Première, delves into the writing of 1984, the final and most influential novel written by the author of Animal Farm. This is the fourth time the Haitian director’s work has been selected, one year after Ernest Cole, Photographe (Ernest Cole, Lost and Found).
In 1949, George Orwell wrote the novel that was to become a classic of speculative fiction. The dystopian themes of mass surveillance, Newspeak and totalitarianism are becoming increasingly familiar in our own time. In his film, Raoul Peck explores the period in which this visionary novel was written.
At the Visions du Réel Festival last April, the director expressed his dismay at the resonance of this work: “Words no longer have any meaning. Science no longer has any meaning. There is no truth, just ‘alternative facts’. We live in a topsy-turvy world where no one says anything. We are terrified. This is what terror looks like. It creeps in slowly.”
Raoul Peck possesses the ability to breathe new life into great minds who, like George Orwell, would have such a lot to say about our current times. Last year, he presented Ernest Cole, Photographe (Ernest Cole, Lost and Found) at a Special Screening dedicated to the photographer who chronicled apartheid in South Africa, and in 2021, he presented Lumumba, la mort d’un prophète (Lumumba, Death of a Prophet), named after the Congolese independence leader who was assassinated in 1961.
In 2017, Raoul Peck, a chronicler of memory using both documentary and fiction, recounted the story of Le Jeune Karl Marx (The Young Karl Marx), the man who would go on to write The Communist Manifesto. Earlier, in 1993, he depicted his native Haiti through the eyes of a child during the dark days of the Duvalier dictatorship in L’Homme sur les quais (The Man on the Shore), a film that secured him a selection in Competition.
