As in his remarkable I Am Not Your Negro, where Raoul Peck retraced the writings and life of James Baldwin to craft a film-essay on the systemic nature of racism, the Haitian director now immerses himself in the work and biography of George Orwell, producing a documentary as clear as indispensable. With Orwell: 2+2=5 Peck approaches Orwell not as a mere canonical author, but as a critical conscience of the twentieth century and of our time. The film interlaces archives, interviews, reconstructions and inserts, shaping a narrative between biography and collective history.Thanks to full access granted by Orwell’s heirs, Peck draws on letters, diaries, published and unpublished writings, photographs and home movies, tracing a path from Orwell’s childhood in India—the first image: in an Indian nanny’s arms—toward a lifelong inquiry culminating, shortly before his death, in “1984”. The equation “2+2=5” becomes a cipher for the manipulation of reality, the fabrication of truth and the political appropriation of language.As before, Peck adopts the form of the visual essay, making montage the axis. The assemblage of archival footage, media images and staged sequences is not illustrative but dialectical: each image calls forth another in tension rather than continuity, opening critical space. The visual apparatus is reinforced by a soundtrack alternating diegetic fragments with Brechtian interventions, deliberately destabilizing any passive reception. The voice-over functions as countertext rather than commentary, producing semantic dissonances that compel the viewer into an active role of interpretation.Orwell: 2+2=5 radicalizes Peck’s idea of cinema as “counter-history”: not a chronicle, but an epistemological intervention that unmasks manipulation while reaffirming Orwell’s relevance. The result is intellectually rigorous and politically urgent: past dystopias, once imagined, appear less as speculative warnings than as terrifying realities of our present.Teresa Cavina