Latest news with #Orwell:2+2=5
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Entertainment
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Dystopia Now! In ‘Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5,' Director Raoul Peck Shows How ‘1984' Author Foresaw Today's Authoritarian Drift — Cannes
'Special military operation.' 'Department of Government Efficiency.' 'Enhanced interrogation techniques.' 'Alternative facts.' We live in a time when governments use lexical distortions to manipulate public opinion – the very thing author George Orwell captured so cogently in his dystopian novel 1984, where the futuristic regime adopts 'Newspeak' and other authoritarian techniques to stamp out independent critical thinking. More from Deadline Raoul Peck's 'Ernest Cole' Shares Cannes' L'Oeil D'or Prize For Best Documentary With 'The Brink Of Dreams' Raoul Peck Directing Documentary 'The Hands That Held The Knives' On Assassination Of Haitian President Jovenel Moise Nu Boyana Exec Launches Next Gen Company Hollywood Influence Studios With Stratosphere-Shot Debut 'Above The End' The time is ripe then to reexamine a writer who, though he died 75 years ago, foresaw how leaders of today would gaslight their own people to impose their will and squash dissent. Oscar-nominated filmmaker Raoul Peck takes on that task in his new documentary Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5, premiering on Saturday at the Cannes Film Festival. 'A 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,' Peck tells Deadline. For his examination of Orwell and his thought, the director drew upon the writer's personal archives. 'The estate allowed me to have access to everything — to published, unpublished [work], private letters, unpublished manuscripts. And that's something, especially in today's world where buying a chapter of a book costs you a fortune,' Peck says. 'It was a gift to be able to have access to everything. It was the same gift I had with James Baldwin' (focus of Peck's acclaimed film I Am Not Your Negro). Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5 traces the writer's effort to complete 1984 in the late 1940s as tuberculosis took the last vestiges of his health. He was hospitalized regularly as he worked on the manuscript on the Scottish island of Jura in the Inner Hebrides. The film also dials back to experiences much earlier in Orwell's life that formed his humanistic worldview. In private writings – voiced by actor Damian Lewis – Orwell describes growing up with the ideology common to a Briton of his background (he described himself as 'lower upper-middle class'). He was educated at Eton but instead of following the common path of his classmates to Oxford or Cambridge, he joined the British Imperial Service, working as a colonial police officer in Burma (present-day Myanmar). 'The key to who he became was in Burma. He realized he was there as an imperialist,' Peck observes. 'He was there as a European and doing the worst things a human being can do to normal people — not to combatants, not to communists — to normal people, 'Coolies,' farmers. And he did not like himself. He did not like what he was doing, and he was doing it for the Empire. That was the big break. And he never was able to reconcile that. And he knew he had to keep his critical mind always, no matter who's the boss, no matter who is the king, no matter who's the president, he needs to keep his critical mind.' He threw his lot in with working people, chronicling life on the lower economic rungs in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) and The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). He fought fascism in Spain in the 1930s, documenting his experience in Homage to Catalonia (1938). 'The thing that made him interesting to me beside his books, besides his ideas, was the fact that he lived through those things. He wrote from his experience, his own personal experience, not from any intellectual awareness of anything. Not that I'm against that, but there is a sort of credibility that can only be gained from going through those things yourself,' the filmmaker says. 'And this is something he did very frontally, very decisively, and trying to live among the poor, among the disinherited, because that was important to him to feel before he writes, to understand before he can write and to verify what his instinct was. And by the way, he didn't do it from a superior point of view, but he criticized himself as well. He put himself under his own analysis, and he did that very early on.' Orwell described himself as a democratic socialist, but he abhorred the sort of mind control exerted by ostensibly socialist or communist regimes like the USSR and its satellites. Animal Farm, published in 1945 as the Soviet Union was clamping its pincers on Eastern Europe, and 1948 – published at a time when Stalin had drawn the Iron Curtain between East and West – illustrate the moral depravity of the powerful who exert dominance over the powerless. But, as Peck believes, Orwell has wrongly been interpreted as relevant only to an earlier time of Stalinist totalitarianism. Forcing people to accept that 2 + 2 + 5 (as happens in 1984) – how different is being forcefed the lies of Putin that he unleashed hell on Ukrainian civilians to 'denazify' the country? How different is it from Pres. Trump attempting to rewrite reality by describing the January 6 attack on the U.S. capital as 'a day of love'? Orwell saw, as shown in Peck's documentary, that totalitarian regimes engage in 'continuous alteration of the past.' 'Orwell has been put in a little box as an anti-Stalinist or an anti-Soviet, anti-authoritarian regime,' Peck comments. 'But you hear what he says in the film, authoritarians don't all only happen in faraway countries. It can happen as well in the U.K., in the United States and elsewhere. So, the scope [of the film] was from the get-go very wide. For me, it was not just an anti-Trump or anti-whatever agenda.' Peck was born in Haiti but as a child he and his family fled to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to escape the dictatorial regime of François 'Papa Doc' Duvalier, an authoritarian who enjoyed the support of many successive American governments. That high level hypocrisy – America, the shining beacon of liberty, propping up a dictator – made Peck as acutely sensitive to the abuse of political language as Orwell. 'When Kennedy or Nixon or Johnson, were talking about Haiti, supporting a dictatorship, and the word democracy was in every speech, how could I reconcile that?' he questions. 'You are supporting a guy who has killed thousands and thousands of people, who is keeping his people poor, who is corrupt, where there is torture. So how do you reconcile that? Very early on, I was always suspect of certain words that people were using.' Ultimately, what Orwell was about is asserting the dignity of individuals, especially the downtrodden, against forces of exploitation, be they economic and/or political. He's as relevant to our times as he was to the mid-20th century. 'When you encounter a thinker like Orwell, and you feel, wow, he gets it. He gets what the 'other' is, he has empathy,' Peck says. 'He looks at everybody as a human being, whether you are poor, rich or Burmese or British or a worker in a kitchen in Paris, he sees you first as a human being. And that's very rare. That's very rare.' Best of Deadline 2025 TV Cancellations: Photo Gallery Where To Watch All The 'Mission: Impossible' Movies: Streamers With Multiple Films In The Franchise Everything We Know About 'My Life With The Walter Boys' Season 2 So Far
Time Magazine
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Magazine
Raoul Peck's Brilliant Orwell: 2+2=5 Is the Boldest Documentary Anyone Could Make Right Now
R aoul Peck is one of our most valuable documentary filmmakers. Instead of just presenting us with information, he shows us ways of seeing, inspiring us to look for patterns and connections we might not have seen otherwise. That's the principle at work in his new documentary Orwell: 2+2=5, premiering at the Cannes Film Festival. You can know George Orwell's work backward and forward and still find something new in Peck's film; or you can be an Orwell neophyte and understand why, 75 years after his death, his ideas and preoccupations feel more modern than ever. At certain points in the 20th century, dystopian novels like Animal Farm and 1984 may have seemed unnecessarily alarmist, cautionary tales but not necessarily foregone conclusions about our future. In 2025, they read like nonfiction. In these books, and in the witty, joyously precise essays he wrote during his lifetime, Orwell worried in advance about the lives we're living today. Orwell: 2+2=5 makes the case for why we should be worrying, too. Peck's 2016 film I Am Not Your Negro, a kind of imagined reconstruction of the ambitious historical work James Baldwin was just starting to write when he died, in 1987, is one of the finest documentaries of this century so far, a mini-history of Black racial identity in America from the mid- to late 20th century. With Orwell: 2+2=5, Peck returns to a similar idea: sometimes a writer's final work—the last thing they leave behind, even if they'd hoped to accomplish more—can become an unwittingly definitive statement. Orwell: 2+2=5 begins with the beginning of an end: in 1946, the writer born with the name Eric Arthur Blair retreated to the unruly and beautiful Scottish island of Jura, where he would write what would become his final completed book. 1984 is the story of a dutiful average citizen in a futuristic society, Winston Smith, who goes about the tasks of his job (rewriting history according to the whims of his country's totalitarian government) even as he harbors secret dreams of rebellion. That makes him, in just one of the many unnervingly prescient terms Orwell coined for the book, a 'thought-criminal,' which leads to his capture and brutal re-education. The novel was published in 1949, the year before Orwell would succumb to tuberculosis, which he'd contracted as he was writing the book. Orwell: 2+2=5 —its title derived from a mathematical falsehood that wasn't invented by Orwell, but which he used as an example of how humans can be programmed to believe that a lie is the truth—both tells the story of Orwell's last years and makes the case for his work as a weapon against the malicious forces seeking to undermine our autonomy as thinking human beings. Intricate and multi-layered, it covers a lot of territory in a runtime of roughly two hours; you might feel yourself racing to keep up with it. But that's what makes Peck's work in general, and this documentary in particular, so exhilarating. To say Orwell's language feels modern isn't exactly right—few writers of today are as clear or defiantly direct—but his ideas hit as if he'd formulated them only yesterday. Excerpts from his books and essays—read by Damien Lewis—float over news clips showing streets reduced to rubble after 2003's Battle of Basra in Iraq, or capturing the anguish of man grieving over a child's body in 2023 Gaza. Just as we're processing a characteristically observant Orwell sentence like 'To be corrupted by totalitarianism, one does not have to live in a totalitarian country,' a sly clip of George W. Bush declaring war on Iraq flashes before us. Peck is a master at matching words with images. His thinking is sophisticated, but never abstract. He covers a lot of ground in a short amount of time, outlining the biographical details of Orwell's life, including the time he spent as a member of the Indian Imperial Police in Burma in the early 1920s, an experience that drastically shaped his later political beliefs. (He came to loathe himself for having been 'part of the actual machinery of despotism.') There are clips from movies and television, too, and not just the two film adaptations of 1984 (the first being Michael Anderson's 1956 version, followed by Michael Radford's in 1984). We get snippets of David Lean's 1948 Oliver Twist and Sydney Pollack's 1985 Out of Africa: Peck helps us understand, in dots and dashes, the world Orwell came from; amazingly, he makes the complexities of class politics in Great Britain almost easy to understand. But most of all, Peck is blazingly forthright in his championing of Orwell as a man from the past who may just hold the key to the world's future. You might think that's too tall an order for any human—but that's only if you haven't read Orwell. He was clever and fun, as well as serious-minded—exactly the opposite of dull and instructive. And he understood better than any other 20th century English-speaking writer how language could be used to confuse and corrupt. In the pages of 1984 he served up slogans so fiendishly distinctive that you'd have to be brain-dead to miss the warnings wrapped up in them. Peck shares some of them with us here: 'Freedom is slavery.' 'War is peace.' These jangly contradictions, presented as truths, are designed to rattle and rewire our brains; just think how easily a corrupt authoritarian leader could put them to use, and how readily a not-thinking public could fall right in line. Peck doesn't spell that out for us—he doesn't have to. Orwell: 2+2=5 feels like the boldest documentary anyone could make right now. Another slogan from 1984: 'Ignorance is strength.' If you don't feel that one in your gut right now, you're sleepwalking through life.
Yahoo
11-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Raoul Peck on His Cannes-Bound George Orwell Documentary and the Threat of Dictatorship: ‘Terror Comes Slowly'
Raoul Peck, who will be at the Cannes Film Festival next month with his George Orwell documentary, 'Orwell: 2+2=5,' delivered a blistering warning about the global rise of autocracy this week at documentary festival Visions du Réel, where he is guest of honor. 'Orwell: 2+2=5,' which will debut in Cannes' Première section, is made in collaboration with the Orwell estate and delves deep into the British writer's final months and legacy, including his bestselling novel '1984.' More from Variety 'The Golden Swan' Director on Bringing to Screen Her Brother's 'Journey From Hate to Reconciliation' Before Murder by Terrorists Rosie O'Donnell's Doc 'Unleashing Hope: The Power of Service Dogs for Children With Autism' Sets April Debut on Hulu (EXCLUSIVE) The Weather Channel Nabs 'Rocky Mountain Wreckers' Docuseries About Recovery Crews On Thursday, Cannes chief Thierry Frémaux said at the festival's press conference that Peck's film would look at 'the strength and relevance of his ideas, and his anticipation of what will become of societies if we don't take care of them. That was in the '30s and '40s. We didn't pay enough attention to that and maybe we're not very far from it now; that's the thesis of this film.' Addressing a sold-out masterclass at Visions du Réel, Peck drew a chilling line between Orwell's warnings and the current political climate. 'I was talking about Orwell – his 'Newspeak.' Words don't mean anything anymore. Science doesn't mean anything. There's no truth – there are 'alternative facts.' We're living in a world that's upside down, where no one says anything. We're terrified. That's what terror is. It comes slowly,' said Peck, who fled his native Haiti with his family at the age of 8 to escape the Duvalier dictatorship. 'They dismissed anyone who wasn't an outspoken supporter of the new regime. When you've lived under a dictatorship, you recognize the signs we see today: when journalists lower their heads, when nobody dares to say that the king is naked, that the king is talking nonsense.' Talking to Variety in March about the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump, Peck said that the world is at the mercy of 'crazy people' who have put the lives of millions at stake, and compared Trump-supporting manifesto 'Project 2025' to 'Mein Kampf.' The deconstruction of systemic racism is the cornerstone of Peck's work. His Oscar-nominated 'I Am Not Your Negro' (2016), based on the writings of civil rights activist James Baldwin, and his Peabody-winning HBO docuseries 'Exterminate All the Brutes' (2021) examine the roots of racial violence and colonialism through a global lens. Asked whether he was given carte blanche by HBO, Peck said: 'I was aware it might be the last film I made in the U.S., but how could you attack a film which addresses the Holocaust, slavery, the genocide of Native Americans, and shows that it's all connected? There's a moment in the film when I ask, 'Make America Great Again' — when exactly was America great?' The comment drew applause from the VdR audience. An outspoken critic of Trump, Peck says he has always taken full responsibility for his words, and when his creative freedom is threatened, he simply relocates. 'I knew I had to bring to the screen what I saw, to deconstruct dominant narratives. We need to create a new world for the next generation. I don't have an agenda – just threads that, when woven together, offer another perspective,' he said. 'Because filmmaking is a mission: one of freedom and risk-taking. I always make films knowing that each one might be the last. I thought ['Exterminate All the Brutes'] could be my last in the U.S.' Peck, who navigates fluidly between documentary and fiction, also lamented the current state of non-fiction filmmaking. 'It's a catastrophe. The documentary world has been completely transformed by money and the streamers,' he said. 'Over the past 10 years, a lot of people thought they could get rich making documentaries — they didn't understand that a documentary isn't a product. It takes patience and understanding.' He added: 'It's becoming harder and harder to get funding without strings attached. Look at Trump: one of the first things he did was go after every institution that still supports independent filmmakers — especially programs labeled as 'diversity' — meaning Black filmmakers, women, LGBTQ+ filmmakers. 'As for the doc bubble? It's burst,' said Peck. 'A lot of people had invested heavily, and now they're going bankrupt or realizing they can't sell their films to streamers. Because the platforms have decided what kind of 'documentary' they want: true crime, comedy, horror and celebrity scandals.' 'Orwell: 2+2=5' marks Peck's fourth Cannes premiere. He first appeared on the Croisette in 1993 with 'The Man by the Shore,' selected in competition. 'Lumumba,' about the U.S.-sanctioned plot to assassinate Congo's democratically elected prime minister, screened in Directors' Fortnight in 2000. In 2012, he served on the main jury, and last year, he won the Œil d'Or for best documentary with 'Ernest Cole: Lost and Found,' which he shared with 'The Brink of Dreams' co-directors Nada Riyadh and Ayman El Amir. 'Orwell: 2+2=5' is produced by Alex Gibney's Jigsaw Productions and Peck's Velvet Films alongside Universal Pictures Content Group, in partnership with Nick Shumaker's Anonymous Content and Closer Media. North American sales are handled by Neon, the two-time best picture Oscar winner with 'Anora' and 'Parasite.' Best of Variety New Movies Out Now in Theaters: What to See This Week What's Coming to Disney+ in April 2025 The Best Celebrity Memoirs to Read This Year: From Chelsea Handler to Anthony Hopkins
