– “At some point, you’re next in line” –
by Denton Davidson | Gold Derby | October 9, 2025
The Oscar-nominated filmmaker behind I Am Not Your Negro brings George Orwell’s words to life in a new documentary that warns against apathy, denial, and the rewriting of truth.
When Raoul Peck takes on an author, he’s not just making a film — he’s starting a conversation across time. His Oscar-nominated I Am Not Your Negro gave James Baldwin a piercing second life on screen. Now, in Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5, Peck turns his gaze toward George Orwell, a writer whose warnings about truth, power, and authoritarianism feel almost too timely for today.
The film opened Oct. 3 in New York and will expand to Los Angeles and theaters nationwide on Oct. 10. Arriving amid growing cultural anxiety over disinformation and political division, the documentary examines how Orwell’s words still echo in the modern world.
Backed by the full cooperation of Orwell’s estate, the documentary zeroes in on the writer’s final years. Gravely ill yet desperate to finish 1984, Orwell becomes both subject and lens: a man racing against death while dissecting the machinery of oppression. “I’m not making a biography, I’m telling a story,” Peck tells Gold Derby. “Once my story is Orwell in the last years of his life, struggling to write 1984, that was enough for me. Then I could allow myself to digress, because the audience always has something to follow.”
Peck never expected to land Orwell. The opportunity came through Johnny Fewings, a former Universal U.K. executive, who had secured full access to the author’s papers and contacted producer Alex Gibney. Gibney only agreed to join on one condition: that Peck direct. “I didn’t even know about it,” Peck recalls. “When Alex asked me, of course I said yes. Orwell, how can I say no to Orwell? Within three weeks, we had financed the film.”
The wealth of material — published and unpublished — could have overwhelmed a lesser filmmaker. For Peck, the challenge was focus. “If I don’t have an idea of a libretto, I would be lost in all that material,” he says. “So I had to know my story. That left me with an incredible amount of freedom. I could build layers — archive, music, graphics — because I had the framework.”
Peck admits he initially thought Orwell might be too cold, too distant compared to Baldwin. But an old photograph changed everything. “One was that photo of him with his nanny in India, a Black nanny looking straight at the camera. That was almost a shock, because I recognized that picture. I recognized a world that I knew,” Peck says.
He also re-read Orwell’s essay Why I Write, where the author confessed to his role in enforcing empire during his time in Burma. “He gave his whole body and thoughts and contrition about what he did there,” Peck reflects. “Again, I felt close, because he knew my world, except he was on the other side. But he understood that what he did was not acceptable, so there was some sort of communion. We were speaking the same language.”
That recognition gave Peck the confidence to speak in Orwell’s voice. “I felt more trust in putting myself in his skin and telling the story from the inside, and that changed everything,” he says.
DAMIAN LEWIS AS ORWELL
The next step was finding a voice. Peck turned to Emmy-winning actor Damian Lewis, but he didn’t want a simple narration. “Sometimes, journalists talk about narrative. No, he’s an actor, being Orwell,” Peck explains. “I didn’t tell him, ‘Here’s the text.’ No, he had to think about it like he’s going on stage, and he’s going to be alone on stage, so he better know his character. That’s how the magic can work, and I can draw you inside that intimacy.”
Editing began almost immediately, with Peck cutting footage alongside text drafts and archival finds. “It’s building the film layer by layer,” he said. “The only challenge is to make sure that I only use Orwell’s words and I don’t misuse them. The estate were my ultimate fact-checkers, and when they saw it, they felt like little kids watching their things on the screen.”
ECHOES OF TODAY
The title itself — 2 + 2 = 5 — is shorthand for the authoritarian manipulation of reality. Peck drives the point home with contemporary footage: protests, wars, surveillance systems, and U.S. politics. But he resists the idea that his job is to preach.
“I would say that’s not the role of an artist,” Peck says when asked about viewers who might dismiss the film as a ‘woke Trump hit piece.’ “An artist does his job the best he can. It’s the audience, the person receiving it, to see if it’s doing something to them. My job is to open that for you, and you can engage with it or not. I don’t lecture. I give you the elements and let you be the master of your decision.”
For Peck, Orwell’s relevance doesn’t come from prophecy but from lived experience. “It’s pure privilege and pure fun to see how something written in 1946 or 1947 is so relevant,” he says. “Not because he was a dystopian writer or a prophet, but because he wrote about what he knew — his experience with power, with authoritarian regimes, with class situation, with class privilege. And you can follow him through those discoveries and frustrations and sufferings, and he writes about it in an incredible, beautiful way.”
WARNINGS FOR AMERICA
Peck doesn’t shy away from connecting Orwell’s words to America now. He points to the dangers of apathy in democracy. “There is no such thing as, ‘Well, I don’t vote, it’s not my business.’ You might think it’s not your business, but it will come to you at some point. That’s what is happening,” he says.
He continues: “A lot of people in this country think, oh, they are after the Latinos, they are after the so-called illegals, who are refugees most of the time, but it won’t come to me. That’s not what history teaches us. At one point, they do come to you, because there is no limit when you start doing stuff that is illegal or when you start changing the law to make legal something that has been illegal. That’s how any authoritarian system functions. They create their own legality, they make you believe that two plus two equals five. And make no mistake, at some point, you are next in line.”
CARRYING THE TORCH
Peck sees his work as extending a chain of responsibility. Just as Baldwin’s voice carried into the 21st century through I Am Not Your Negro, Orwell’s analysis speaks directly to today’s audiences. But Peck doesn’t claim the final word. “I hope the film is the beginning of the process for the audience,” he says. “That you go out there and your head is exploding with questions, where you want to know more, talk with somebody, reflect not only on what’s going on in your country, but in your own personal life. That’s my job — to open that for you.”
And in the end, Peck channels Orwell’s own words: if there is hope, it lies in responsibility. “He doesn’t say, ‘There must be hope,’” Peck reminds us. “He says, ‘Man, take your responsibility.’ History will continue. The question is, what do you do?”
Read the rest of the original article at Gold Derby