NEW FILM – Orwell, Trump and the persistence of fascism: ‘He was giving us a warning’

Raoul Peck, director of a new film about the author, tells Dorian Lynskey that the dystopia of Nineteen Eighty-Four was drawn from lived experience, not prophecy

Dorian Lynskey, The Nerve, Mar 28, 2026

Raoul Peck did not consider himself an expert on George Orwell until fellow documentary-maker Alex Gibney approached him with the opportunity to make a film approved by the Orwell estate, with full access to its vast archive. Working on Orwell: 2+2=5 transformed Peck’s sense of who Orwell was and how his work continues to illuminate our understanding of power and oppression 76 years after his death.

He presents Orwell as an endlessly curious international figure – born (as Eric Blair) in India, a colonial policeman in Burma, an anti-fascist volunteer in Spain – who spent the last year or so of his life confined to hospital beds with tuberculosis while finishing his final novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell’s piercing words, read by Damian Lewis, are illustrated by a startling array of images culled from movies, news reports, documentaries, cameraphone footage and even AI, spanning numerous countries over more than a century.

Peck identifies with the ambition Orwell expressed in his 1946 essay Why I Write: “What I have most wanted to do … is to make political writing into an art.” He is also an internationalist: born in Haiti in 1953, he was educated in Kinshasa, New York, Orléans and Berlin. He worked as a journalist, photographer and taxi driver while making his first short films in the early 1980s. He has since directed seven feature films, including biopics of Karl Marx and the Congolese politician Patrice Lumumba, and 10 documentaries. I Am Not Your Negro, his innovative 2016 study of his personal hero, James Baldwin, won a César and was nominated for an Oscar, while his 2021 HBO series about colonial genocide, Exterminate All the Brutes, earned him a Peabody. Between 1996 and 1997 he was Haiti’s minister of culture.

I made my own investigation of Orwell’s life and legacy in my 2019 book The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, so I spoke to Peck for an onstage Q&A after a screening of his film at the Curzon cinema in Bloomsbury earlier this week. This is an edited version of that conversation.

“………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. That’s the thing. People talk about him being prophetic but actually I think the message is that it’s the continuity. He’s not predicting things. He’s observing things that were happening in the 1930s and the 1940s. We’re still doing the same things, we have the same problems – they’re just new iterations.

Yes, it’s the same capitalist society. The rules are the same. The way for capitalists to continue are the same, from crisis to crisis. It’s always the same cycle and it’s becoming even more dangerous because it can explode the whole planet. Orwell was analysing his own society. That’s the mistake we make about Orwell, to think that it’s his imagination. No, he was writing about stuff that he went through. He has to deal with it: that craziness, the lies, the abuses. It’s a warning he’s giving to us. [The working title] of Nineteen Eighty-Four was The Last Man in Europe. That was a warning to his own people, to say, yes, we can have fascism in the UK.

…………………….Don’t tell me that what I’m seeing is not what I’m seeing. That scene in The Crystal Spirit, talking to his son, where he says there will be people who try to make you believe that 2+2=5, and they are called governments, and they will torture you and they will kill you – I think the whole Orwell essence is in that dialogue.

……………………….Orwell: 2+2=5 is in cinemas now.

Dorian Lynskey is the Nerve’s theatre critic. He co-hosts the politics podcast Origin Story (and previously co-presented Remainiacs). His 2019 book The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s 1984 was longlisted for both the Baillie Gifford and Orwell Prize. https://www.thenerve.news/p/raoul-peck-interview-film-orwell-2-2-5-dorian-lynskey?utm_source=www.thenerve.news&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=weekend-edition-stewart-lee-orwell-s-warnings-robyn&_bhlid=3ec476febb6669b3cd1441aa6da251aee0c07b0c