When a filmmaker as bold as Raoul Peck tackles the legacy of George Orwell, audiences expect sparks to fly. Peck, best known for his Oscar-nominated documentary I Am Not Your Negro, is no stranger to confronting uncomfortable truths or challenging the status quo. With his latest film, Orwell: 2+2=5, now showing at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco and opening soon at Berkeley’s Rialto Cinemas Elmwood, Peck takes viewers on a journey through Orwell’s life, works, and the eerie resonance of his warnings in today’s world.
From the opening frames, Peck’s documentary signals that it’s not just another literary biography. Drawing from Orwell’s diaries, essays, and novels—most notably Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm—the film proceeds in chronological order, mapping the arc of Eric Arthur Blair’s (Orwell’s real name) life. Born in 1903 in the Bengal Presidency of India, Orwell’s early years were shaped by the British Empire’s grip on its colonies. His father, a career civil servant, held the post of Sub-Deputy Opium Agent, and Orwell himself would later serve as a police officer in Burma. This firsthand experience of colonialism left a mark. As Orwell once reflected, “In order to hate imperialism, you have got to be part of it.”
Peck’s film meticulously traces Orwell’s journey from the heart of empire to a committed, lifelong opponent of totalitarianism, fascism, and Stalinism. According to Variety, Peck draws on a rich trove of archival materials, including readings of Orwell’s writings by actor Damian Lewis, news footage spanning from the Spanish Civil War to present-day conflicts, and a montage of film adaptations that have kept Orwell’s vision alive for generations. Viewers are treated to scenes from Michael Radford’s and Michael Anderson’s versions of Nineteen Eighty-Four, animated takes on Animal Farm by John Stephenson and Ralph Steadman, and even cinematic homages like Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report. Peck also nods to Ken Loach’s political filmography and the BBC’s 1966 broadcast The Frost Report, which offered a biting critique of Britain’s class system.
But what truly sets Orwell: 2+2=5 apart is its bold embrace of generative artificial intelligence (AI) as both a storytelling device and a subject of scrutiny. Peck’s use of AI-generated imagery in the film is not hidden in the fine print—it’s front and center, a deliberate choice that echoes the film’s themes. As The Atlantic reports, the documentary includes a sequence featuring AI-created images that were circulated by supporters of Donald Trump during the 2024 presidential campaign. These images, which depicted Trump surrounded by smiling Black Americans who didn’t actually exist, were intended to project a certain narrative. A BBC investigation found that these pictures appeared to have been “made and shared by US voters themselves,” illustrating, as Peck notes, how the very concept of objective truth is under siege in the digital age.
Peck is refreshingly transparent about his use of AI. “I couldn’t fake it or not say that I’m using it, and I don’t use it just for the sake of using it. I knew it was part of the whole deconstruction of language and image and reality,” he explained to reporters at Neon, the film’s distributor. The film’s AI-generated images are intentionally uncanny—faces morph and distort, pop songs with authoritarian lyrics play over montages, and the effect is as unsettling as it is thought-provoking. Peck’s approach stands in contrast to other recent documentaries, like Morgan Neville’s Roadrunner or Free Leonard Peltier, where AI was used to replicate the voices of deceased subjects, sometimes without clear disclosure. Peck’s philosophy: if you’re going to use AI, be upfront about it and control the narrative, rather than letting the technology dictate the story.
“It’s not an instrument at this stage that I could use and say ‘This is cinema,’” Peck remarked. “If you don’t have a handle on what you’re creating, it’s a lottery. We should control our instrument, and not the other way around.” For Peck, the grotesque quality of the AI images is a feature, not a flaw—they mirror the world’s current state, where reality itself feels increasingly malleable and manipulated.
The film doesn’t shy away from controversy. In one segment, Peck uses a series of captions to highlight what he sees as contemporary examples of Orwellian Newspeak. One such caption defines “Antisemitism 2024” as “a weaponized term to silence critics of Israeli occupation.” Peck reportedly agonized over the wording, adding the “2024” to clarify his intent, but still faced criticism from some viewers. A Jewish friend told him she felt a “kind of malaise” when the audience at Cannes responded with applause. Peck’s willingness to provoke and challenge, even at the risk of discomfort, is part of what gives the film its edge.
Throughout Orwell: 2+2=5, Peck draws connections across decades and continents, showing how the mechanisms of authoritarianism persist and evolve. The film cuts from fascist Spain in 1937 to Israeli bulldozers demolishing Palestinian settlements in 2024, from the rise of Stalin to the rise of AI-driven surveillance states. In one particularly chilling sequence, Peck uses AI to generate images of smiling, blank-faced people whose features gradually contort into silent screams, all set to a peppy AI-generated pop song. The lyrics, “I am watching you, ’cause I know what’s good for you… You want to be safe, and I’m here for you,” echo the sinister logic of Orwell’s Big Brother.
Peck’s documentary is as much a meditation on the power and peril of images as it is a biography of Orwell. The filmmaker’s own background—having served as Haiti’s minister of culture and chronicled histories of oppression and resistance—infuses the film with urgency and depth. He’s not interested in nostalgia or hagiography. Instead, he asks viewers to reckon with the ongoing relevance of Orwell’s warnings: the danger of unchecked power, the erosion of truth, and the seductive allure of safety at the cost of freedom.
As the credits roll, Peck subverts the usual documentary convention. Instead of an uplifting pop song, he lets the AI-generated anthem play on, its lyrics growing more self-congratulatory and unsettling by the second. It’s a sly nod to the final, chilling line of Nineteen Eighty-Four: not only must the people obey, but they must also love their oppressors.
For those who think Orwell’s warnings are relics of the past, Orwell: 2+2=5 offers a bracing reminder: the struggle over truth, language, and power is as urgent as ever. Peck’s film doesn’t pretend to have easy answers, but it asks the right questions—and in today’s world, that’s no small feat.
