by Sam Adams | Slate Magazine | May 21, 2025
– Dazzling and Terrifying –
The best documentary I’ve seen at Cannes, political or otherwise, is Raoul Peck’s Orwell: 2+2=5, which interweaves a personal portrait of the author with a wide-ranging exploration of how his ideas are playing out in the current world. Ending with a picture of Orwell and his Indian nanny, the movie’s approach is justified by two of Orwell’s ideas in particular: that a person’s politics can only be explained by examining their origins, and that you can only truly hate imperialism if you are a part of it.
As the product of a “lower-upper-middle-class” family that strove to be seen as landed gentry without possessing any land of their own, Orwell understood the workings of the ruling class without access to them, which sharpened his sense of the world’s inequities. Peck interweaves footage from recent struggles around the world, from Ukraine to Gaza to Myanmar, paralleling the current rise of fascism with the one Orwell fought against in Spain in the 1930s, and the one he envisaged in 1984, which he wrote as he was dying of tuberculosis.
Peck’s approach can be sprawling to a fault, taking on so many subjects and so much horror that the movie is overwhelming in more ways than one. But he has a keen eye for repeated patterns, a sense that the arc of history is more like a corkscrew. When he juxtaposes shots of contemporary dictators like Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán, you’re just waiting for the inevitable punchline about Donald Trump, but instead he cuts back to George W. Bush, using the onset of the Iraq War as the moment when American doublespeak truly took hold. (Trump shows up plenty, of course, including a hard cut from cries of “Long live Big Brother” to the 2024 Republican National Convention.)
The former Haitian minister of culture, Peck, who also directed the Oscar-nominated I Am Not Your Negro, is also one of the most incisive and politically incendiary filmmakers working today, and Orwell: 2+2=5 may be his widest-ranging and most ambitious work. (It’s also the first movie I’ve seen to make intelligent and purposeful use of generative A.I.) It’s dazzling and terrifying, a guide to a political movement that has been gathering steam for decades and shows no signs of letting up. It’s also a profoundly pessimistic movie, but it’s galvanizing in its understanding that the struggles we now face have been fought before, and some of them were won.
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