{"id":11969,"date":"2025-08-20T16:40:08","date_gmt":"2025-08-20T16:40:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/11969\/"},"modified":"2025-08-20T16:40:08","modified_gmt":"2025-08-20T16:40:08","slug":"225-urgent-raoul-peck-documentary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/11969\/","title":{"rendered":"2+2=5,’ Urgent Raoul Peck Documentary"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tEXCLUSIVE:<\/strong> It\u2019s been more than 75 years since George Orwell published his classic 1984, a crucial novel that introduced the world to Big Brother, Thought Police and \u201cNewspeak.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tNever has Orwell\u2019s warning about the danger of state repression, mind control and forced obedience to an all-powerful Party been more relevant or prescient than now. Oscar-nominated filmmaker Raoul Peck<\/a> explores the vital importance of the British writer\u2019s oeuvre in his new documentary Orwell: 2+2=5<\/a> (that false equation of the title also coming from 1984).<\/p>\n

\n\tThe documentary will hold its North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival<\/a> next month, where Peck unveiled his equally essential James Baldwin film I Am Not Your Negro in 2016. We have your first look at Orwell: 2+2=5 in the trailer above.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"'Orwell:<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\u2018Orwell: 2+2=5\u2019<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tVelvet Films\/Jigsaw Productions\/Neon<\/p>\n

\n\tPeck, who has directed narrative films on Patrice Lumumba and the young Karl Marx, and documentaries about Lumumba, photographer Ernest Cole, and his native Haiti among many others, premiered Orwell: 2+2=5 at the Cannes Film Festival<\/a> in May.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cA man that died in January 1950, to be that accurate about what is happening today, you better take a second look and try to learn even more from him,\u201d the director told Deadline<\/a> just before Cannes. Oscar winner Alex Gibney, who produced the film, brought the Orwell project to Peck.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cAlex called me and ask me if I was interested,\u201d he noted. \u201cOrwell is not something you can say no to. And those are gifts to be able to have access to everything \u2014 it was the same gift I had with James Baldwin. The [Orwell] estate allowed me to have access to everything, to published, unpublished [work], private letters, unpublished manuscripts. And that\u2019s something, especially in today\u2019s world where buying a chapter of a book costs you a fortune.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen 1984 was published in 1949, the novel was seen as an allegorical take on the Soviet Union.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"British<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tBritish writer George Orwell<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy of Neon<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cOrwell had been also put in a little box as anti-Stalin or anti-Soviet, anti-authoritarian regime,\u201d Peck said. \u201cBut you hear what he said in the film, authoritarians don\u2019t only happen in faraway countries. It can happen as well in the UK, in the United States and elsewhere.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tYes, Donald Trump<\/a> makes a fleeting appearance in the trailer, the president who, in his latest salvo, is trying to scrub the Smithsonian Institution of historical references that he finds unflattering to America \u2013 in what some would consider a Thought Police-style imposition of his ideology. (\u201cThe Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been,\u201d Trump posted on social media Tuesday, \u201c\u2014 Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future.\u201d).<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Director<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tDirector Raoul Peck<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy of Matthew Avignone<\/p>\n

\n\tOrwell: 2+2=5 will be honored at the 6th Annual Albie Awards<\/a> in New York City on Sept. 24, an event put on by the Maysles Documentary Center that recognizes the most impactful documentaries of the year. The documentary screens at TIFF<\/a> on Monday, Sept. 8 and Tuesday, Sept. 9.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWhile he\u2019s best known as the author of Animal Farm and 1984,\u201d TIFF\u2019s chief documentary programmer Thom Powers writes in the festival program, \u201cthis film opens us to a wider range of his writing that drew from his personal experience of poverty in Down and Out in Paris and London, of colonialism in Burmese Days, and of revolutionary uprising in Homage to Catalonia.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cPeck pulls lines and impressions from these works and others, enlisting British actor Damian Lewis<\/a> to embody the voice of the author. Visually, Peck uses film footage from multiple adaptations of 1984 and Animal Farm. He layers in contemporary news and documentary footage to evoke the alarming rise of totalitarianism, surveillance, and government violence in our present day.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tNeon is distributing the film. Watch the trailer for Orwell: 2+2=5 above.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"EXCLUSIVE: It\u2019s been more than 75 years since George Orwell published his classic 1984, a crucial novel that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11970,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[263],"tags":[11519,11520,18,117,19,17,327,11521,11522,11523,9445],"class_list":{"0":"post-11969","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-cannes-film-festival","9":"tag-damian-lewis","10":"tag-eire","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-ie","13":"tag-ireland","14":"tag-movies","15":"tag-orwell-225","16":"tag-raoul-peck","17":"tag-tiff","18":"tag-toronto-international-film-festival"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11969","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11969"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11969\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11970"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11969"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11969"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11969"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}