Cannes also makes room for politically engaged documentaries like the one from acclaimed Haitian director Raoul Peck. In Orwell: 2+2=5, presented in the Cannes Première 2025 section, Peck turns George Orwell, author of 1984 and Animal Farm, into more than a writer of the past century, that is into a troubling contemporary figure, a lucid and visionary chronicler of our times. Through the voice-over of Damian Lewis, letters, texts, and fragments of 1984 intertwine in an audiovisual choreography of images, ideas, and warnings that resonate in the present with terrifying intensity. Peck doesn’t illustrate, he denounces. He doesn’t revere, he interprets.
Peck crafts a high-intensity film essay from archival footage, graphic interventions, and scenes from various film adaptations of 1984 – Michael Anderson’s (1956), the iconic version by Michael Radford (1984), and the 1954 BBC television film directed by Rudolph Cartier – as well as literary fragments Orwell wrote between 1946 and 1948 while living on the remote island of Jura in Scotland. There, under precarious conditions and suffering from tuberculosis, Orwell shaped one of the most influential dystopias of the 20th century.
The phrase “2+2=5,” taken directly from 1984, functions here as a symbol of the moment when logic surrenders to power. Peck turns this symbol into a guiding thread to map Orwell’s personal and ideological journey, from colonial disillusionment in Burma to his radical opposition to all forms of totalitarianism, whether fascist or communist.
Indeed, the texts Orwell wrote in the 1940s don’t feel archival, they feel urgent. Peck doesn’t revive them out of nostalgia, but rather presents them as early diagnoses of the contemporaneity. The manipulation of language, systematic surveillance, information control, and the fabrication of imaginary enemies are not relics of the past; they have mutated into fake news, culture wars, and emotional control algorithms.
Co-produced between the U.S. and France, Orwell: 2+2=5 is Raoul Peck at his sharpest since I Am Not Your Negro (2016). Once again, he proves his mastery of the filmic collage. The editing is dizzying yet precise; the tone, more bitter than solemn. He layers temporalities and political contexts to compose a map of language manipulation, historical revisionism, and the fragility of truth.
Here, Peck leaves lyricism behind to go straight to the bone, less poetic, more surgical. A necessary essay in a time when facts compete with feelings and lies no longer need disguises. What if the future were already here, and we had simply accepted it with resignation?
Orwell: 2+2=5 will be released in U.S. theaters on August 22 and will arrive on Apple TV+ on September 5.
