EXCLUSIVE: It’s been more than 75 years since George Orwell published his classic 1984, a crucial novel that introduced the world to Big Brother, T
EXCLUSIVE: It’s 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 “Newspeak.”
Never has Orwell’s 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 explores the vital importance of the British writer’s oeuvre in his modern documentary Orwell: 2+2=5 (that false equation of the title also coming from 1984).
The documentary will hold its North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival next month, where Peck unveiled his equally crucial James Baldwin film I Am Not Your Negro in 2016. We have your first look at Orwell: 2+2=5 in the trailer above.
‘Orwell: 2+2=5’
Velvet Films/Jigsaw Productions/Neon
Peck, who has directed narrative films on Patrice Lumumba and the youthful 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 in May.
“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,” the director told Deadline just before Cannes. Oscar winner Alex Gibney, who produced the film, brought the Orwell project to Peck.
“Alex called me and ask me if I was interested,” he noted. “Orwell is not something you can say no to. And those are gifts to be able to have access to everything — 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 The [Orwell] estate allowed me to have access to everything, to published, unpublished [work], private letters, unpublished manuscripts.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’s something, especially in today’s world where buying a chapter of a book costs you a fortune.”
When 1984 was published in 1949, the novel was seen as an allegorical take on the Soviet Union.
British writer George Orwell
Courtesy of Neon
“Orwell had been also put in a little box as anti-Stalin or anti-Soviet, anti-authoritarian regime,” Peck said. “But you hear what he said in the film, authoritarians don’t only happen in faraway countries. It can happen as well in the UK, in the United States and elsewhere.”
Yes, Donald Trump 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 – in what some would consider a Thought Police-style imposition of his ideology. (“The 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,” Trump posted on social media Tuesday, “— Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future.”).
Director Raoul Peck
Courtesy of Matthew Avignone
Orwell: 2+2=5 will be honored at the 6th Annual Albie Awards 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 on Monday, Sept. 8 and Tuesday, Sept. 9.
“While he’s best known as the author of Animal Farm and 1984,” TIFF’s chief documentary programmer Thom Powers writes in the festival program, “this 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.
“Peck pulls lines and impressions from these works and others, enlisting British actor Damian Lewis 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.”
Neon is distributing the film. Watch the trailer for Orwell: 2+2=5 above.
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