– Truth, Power, and How Fragile Democracy Can Be –
by Damianista | Fan Fun With Damian Lewis | October 7, 2025
“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” – George Orwell, 1984
Last weekend, I was lucky to attend a screening of ‘Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5’ at the IFC Center in New York, followed by a Q&A with the film’s director, Raoul Peck. After seeing Damian’s recent Instagram post, I knew he was proud to be part of this project—and now I completely understand why. The documentary is timely, smart, and deeply inspiring.
But I do have one minor disagreement with Damian’s post. He says he is the voice of Orwell, but I would argue that he is Orwell in the film. I’ll explain more about that later.
As someone who has been teaching authoritarian politics at university for more than two decades, the film felt very personal to me. During the Q&A, I told Mr. Peck that I’d love to include ‘Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5’ in my course syllabus next year. The film fits perfectly with the topics we discuss in class: truth, power, and how fragile democracy can be.
Before I go further, a quick note: this review won’t have the playful tone I usually use on the blog. The film deals with urgent issues, and it hits close to home because it overlaps with my research and teaching. So, this time, I put on my political scientist hat as I write, to do justice to the powerful film Raoul Peck has given us. If you are here only to see the Q&A, feel free to scroll down 🙂
Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5 has a fantastic narrative flow. It moves seamlessly between George Orwell’s final years—writing 1984 on the Isle of Jura while also being in and out of hospitals—and the striking relevance of his work today, in a world shaped by modern propaganda and distorted truths. Watching it, you can’t help but feel the line between past and present blur. The world Orwell warned us about feels less like fiction, and yet, when you think about it, 1984 was grounded in real events: the rise of fascism in the 1930s, the Spanish Civil War, the reigns of Mussolini and Hitler, and Stalin’s Great Terror in the Soviet Union. What’s truly unsettling is how familiar these events feel today. The documentary makes that connection in a haunting way. As images of dictators and far-right strongmen—Stalin, Hitler, Pinochet, Marcos, Putin, Modi, Orbán, and the like —parade on the screen, it’s clear we have been living in Orwellian times for a long while. As someone from Turkey, I noticed the absence of President Erdoğan—he fits right into that mix!
For those of you unfamiliar with Orwell’s 1984, “2 + 2 = 5” refers directly to the book. Oceania, the fictional totalitarian regime, has complete control over society and its people. The government controls all information and even tries to control thought, forcing citizens to accept obvious falsehoods, like believing that 2 + 2 = 5.
If you grew up in an autocratic or semi-autocratic country—like I did, or like director Raoul Peck did—you don’t need a PhD in political science to recognize these tactics. You just know them. The language, the public displays, the fear—it’s all straight from the dictator’s playbook, even when it’s dressed up in democratic language.
And yet, these tactics aren’t limited to dictatorships. We often think propaganda only exists where free speech is banned. But even democratic leaders use similar methods—in a more subtle way, using the language of democracy, freedom, patriotism, and, their favorite, national security. The goal is the same everywhere: to shape how people see the world to justify government control.
For example, we see in the film that, after 9/11, George W. Bush’s administration presented Iraq as an urgent threat, claiming Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Those weapons never existed. But at the time, this story convinced Congress to give the president authority to go to war in a bipartisan vote. The “truth” wasn’t forced through censorship—it was built through repetition, emotion, and media compliance.
That’s what Raoul Peck shows so well in Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5. Watching it, you see the slow twisting of truth, how language becomes a weapon, and how fear becomes policy. Peck shows that manipulation doesn’t disappear in democracies; it just changes form, finds new platforms and new ways to justify itself.
Vladimir Putin uses heavy-handed control. His story about Ukraine—claiming it’s run by Nazis and is a Western puppet—is the basis for his war. In his version of reality, invasion is self-defense. Russia’s strict media control ensures alternative narratives don’t spread.
Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel uses a similar tactic. Every military action is framed as self-defense, and any criticism is labeled as antisemitism or support for terror. This creates a clear “us versus them” moral story. Once people see the world this way, dissent starts to feel like betrayal.
Donald Trump also used this tactic. By framing immigrants as criminals or invaders or “people eating our cats and dogs”, he simplified complex issues and gave people someone to blame. Across Europe, far-right groups do the same, blaming immigrants for social and economic problems. This fuels fear, divides society, and makes stricter immigration policies more acceptable to the society. The thing is, this type of scapegoating isn’t new. In 1930s Germany, Hitler rose to power democratically by convincing millions of people that Jewish people were to blame for the country’s suffering – unemployment, inflation and social unrest.
As Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5 depicts widespread suffering and destruction from around the world, the scenes of the January 6 attacks on Capitol Hill were the most chilling for me—particularly hearing Trump say, “The love in the air, I’ve never seen anything like it.” I should note that the documentary does not focus solely on the United States; however, the U.S. is currently one of the most striking examples of democratic backsliding. Advanced democracies typically avoid such crises, but according to Freedom House—a U.S.-based nonprofit that publishes an annual report assessing political rights and civil liberties worldwide—the U.S., while obviously categorized as a free country, now has civil and political liberty scores lower than many other advanced democracies. One quick example is book banning in the US public schools which the documentary talks about. There are over 3,000 titles banned at different school districts at the moment in the US though I need to point out that Florida and Texas account for the big chunk of book bans. And when you take a look at the list of the most challenged books in the last decade or so, you see titles varying from Harper Lee’s Pultizer winning classic To Kill a Mockingbird to Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl to Kite Runner by Khaled Husseini to, maybe not surprisingly, 1984 by George Orwell.
Thus, Raoul Peck’s documentary Orwell: 2+2=5 is exactly the kind of wake-up call we need today. Through a haunting collage of archival material, Orwell’s own writings narrated by Damian Lewis, and contemporary images of conflict and propaganda, the film shows truth not as a static fact but as twisted, reframed, and erased. Peck doesn’t lecture. Instead, he immerses you in history: from colonial Burma where Orwell witnessed oppression firsthand as a young police officer, to World War II, to fragile democracies, and finally to today’s distorted political speech, social media spin, and war-time language like “special military operation,” “peacekeeping,” or “clearance operations” that hide real violence and injustice.
The film shows how the super-rich are literally “flying rockets into space” while regular people struggle on Earth, revealing how wealth and power are becoming too concentrated among a very small group. This isn’t just about money—it also affects the information we consume. It’s deeply concerning that some of the richest people in the world—Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Rupert Murdoch, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and others—own much of today’s traditional and social media, giving them huge influence over what people talk about and believe.
The striking photo of Orwell with his Indian nanny in the documentary highlights the suffering and corruption inherent in imperialism. Orwell learned this from firsthand experience and chose to oppose the corrupt system he lived in. That’s why, I believe, he writes the following words in Why I Write which we also hear in the documentary from Damian’s voice:
“My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. The very concept of objective truth is fading out of this world.”
Narration plays a crucial role in documentaries. In semi-autobiographical documentaries like Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5, the narration becomes even more important, as it bridges the personal perspective of the filmmaker with broader historical and political narratives. A carefully chosen narrator can make the story feel intimate, credible, and deeply human, allowing viewers to connect not just with the events, but with the filmmaker’s personal lens.
In this documentary, Damian’s calm, thoughtful delivery provides exactly that sense of intimacy and believability. His narration guides the audience gently through difficult and sometimes shocking material. This understated delivery lets the events speak for themselves while grounding them in a consistent, trustworthy perspective.
At the Q&A following the screening at IFC Center, the director Raoul Peck revealed that he typically chose the voice late in the process because he didn’t know, until he made the film, who would be the best Orwell.
“Because it’s not about a voice. It’s not about a narrator. Journalists sometimes talk about a narrator. He’s not a narrator. He’s Orwell. That’s the magic of cinema.”
It turns out that Mr. Peck had a very short list of British actors in mind for the narration, particularly stage actors, because of their ability to create, and “bring a certain gravitas” to a character. He says it falls on the actor to make the viewer feel Orwell – every emotion, let it be sadness, or humor, or his ironic remarks. He adds:
“You can’t direct that, and you have to trust your actor.”
Peck chose Damian as Orwell because of these qualities, and the film is the concrete proof that their collaboration worked perfectly.
In the Q&A, I had the opportunity to ask Mr. Peck about how they combined the images with the narration. At the beginning of their work together, Damian was in London, and Peck was in Paris. So the director sent the text to Damian and they went over the text together over the phone.
“When you’re an actor of his calibre, when you made theatre, when you’ve been a Shakespearean actor, you know how to carry a character so he had very printed questions for me and my role was to explain some details but basically my main direction is to tell him ‘You are Orwell’ and he has watched the film multiple times, and we go in the studio, and in the studio I’m there with him, and for that recording, it took us a long day. But you know it’s like an actor coming to the stage… the director is not there every day… He has to carry the role by himself. So that’s the kind of work we did. So the recording was him doing his text in front of the microphone, and sometimes he would correct himself by himself, because like in Jazz music, you know when the note is not there, so he would do it, and sometimes he would ask me “oh I failed it” and so it’s a back and forth, building moment after moment what the film will be. And one trick that I have is that the beginning of the recording is usually we’re still not on the right track but I let it go and at the end we redo the first ten minutes so that is really in the film.”
I would like to close on a few fun notes. First, Damian is no stranger to voicing Orwell. In fact, he voiced the talking statue of Orwell. Second, one of my big art nightmares is Damian making a movie with Tom Cruise because I just can’t stand Tom Cruise. And ‘Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5′ gets as close as possible to my nightmare since Cruise appears not once but twice in the documentary in scenes from The Minority Report and War of the Worlds 🙂 And finally, thanks to my number one guy Lewisto, who filmed the Q&A after the screening. Enjoy!
To conclude, ‘Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5’ is a thought-provoking, chilling and insightful documentary. In my humble opinion, if more people saw this film, it could sharpen our collective sense of what’s at stake – exactly what Orwell intended. This isn’t about party politics—it’s about protecting democracy, the constitution, and our rights as citizens. And I’m proud of my favorite actor for taking part in such a project and I thank him for giving me the opportunity to write about a topic very close to my heart and my mind.
‘Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5’ had its World Premiere at the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès at Cannes Film Festival in May. It is now showing at the IFC Center in New York as well as other select U.S. theaters as part of a limited release and director’s tour. The film scheduled to be released nationally on October 10, 2025.
Source: Fan Fun With Damian Lewis