Raoul Peck explores George Orwell’s final years and the writing of 1984 through archival footage, diaries, letters, and narration by Damian Lewis. Blending Orwell’s biography with visuals of surveillance, political rallies, algorithms, and social media, the film links his warnings to today’s truth crisis. Concepts like 'doublethink,' 'Newspeak,' and 'thoughtcrime' are revisited amid rising disinformation and authoritarianism. From Burma to his isolated final days on Jura, Orwell’s life offers enduring insights. Language, memory, and resistance emerge as essential tools against digital-age power.

In George Orwell’s 1984, the protagonist Winston Smith is arrested as a thought criminal and subjected to brutal “re-education.” Under relentless torture, he is forced to accept the false equation “2 + 2 = 5”—a chilling emblem of the state’s power to make citizens believe lies as truth. The phrase predates Orwell, but in his hands it became a searing critique of systems that strip away human autonomy. 

Master political documentarian Raoul Peck draws from Orwell’s letters, essays, and fiction to craft Orwell: 2+2=5, a dazzling, non-linear meditation on the global resurgence of fascism. Peck’s intricate structure reveals the unsettling parallels between Orwell’s dystopian vision and the present, positioning Orwell as an incisive guide to our modern world. From Iraq, Tunisia, and Sudan to Ukraine and Palestine—from the madness of Putin to the bombast of Trump—Peck threads contemporary crises into Orwell’s own chain of thought. 

Divided into three chapters—“War is Peace,” “Freedom is Slavery,” and “Ignorance is Strength”—the film shows how authoritarian leaders can weaponize liberal ideals, and how readily the public can be persuaded to embrace such contradictions. 

Why George Orwell? Why now? Today we know. He has seen it all. Analyzed it all. Warned us all. Orwell. His name has become a potent adjective – “Orwellian” - to signal authoritarian mechanisms and morphing aspects of our contemporary world: surveillance, censorship, political corruption, fake news, class struggles, the seductions of power, doublethink, algorithms, permanent wars. He is all around us now. In our current times of uncertainty, it is the right time, almost a century later, to confront myth with reality, in light of today's clear and present danger, where 2+2 is definitively 5.