Raoul Peck's ORWELL: 2+2=5 (2025)

7th House is proud to present ORWELL: 2+2=5 (2025), a bracing and urgently timely new documentary from Raoul Peck (I Am Not Your Negro), offering a deeply illuminating re-examination of one of the 20th century’s most enduring—and most misinterpreted—writers.

Working in collaboration with the Orwell Estate, Peck constructs a dynamic, intellectually charged portrait that moves fluidly between archival footage, contemporary images, and Orwell’s own words—drawn extensively from his diaries and the revelatory essay “Why I Write,” and voiced with grave precision by Damian Lewis. The result is not simply a biography, but a kind of cinematic thought process: an inquiry into how a life, shaped by empire, war, illness, and moral reckoning, gave rise to a body of work that continues to reverberate with startling clarity.

Far from the flattened image of Orwell as a distant “prophet,” Peck restores him as something more urgent and human—a writer engaged in the contradictions of his time, analyzing the world as it was rather than predicting what it might become. Through this lens, 1984 and Animal Farm emerge not as speculative fictions, but as distilled expressions of lived experience: meditations on power, language, and the quiet, incremental erosion of truth.

Peck’s film draws a precise and unsettling line between Orwell’s era and our own, tracing how mechanisms of control—surveillance, disinformation, the manipulation of language—persist and evolve. Through a rigorously constructed montage that juxtaposes historical record with present-day imagery, the film reveals a world that feels less like Orwell’s future than our own present tense. Terms like “Big Brother” and “Newspeak,” once literary inventions, now feel embedded in the fabric of everyday life. What emerges is less a warning than a recognition: a reminder that the structures Orwell examined have never truly disappeared, only adapted.

At once intimate and expansive, ORWELL: 2+2=5 is a film about the necessity of clear thinking in moments of distortion—about the fragile but essential act of insisting, against all pressure, that two plus two still equals four.

Dir. Raoul Peck, 2025, 118 mins, USA/France, English, Rated R, Digital.

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