From Orwell 2+2=5 to Frankenstein : TIFF’s Films on Power, Creation, and Survival Are a Warning

Director Raoul Peck, who gave us 2016’s I Am Not Your Negro, didn’t make Orwell: 2+2=5 to feel like a documentary in the usual sense—it’s a dare, the sort of blunt truth authoritarian regimes treat like contraband.

The film portrays a slow-creep march around authoritarianism, not from an academic distance, but as an unsettling, visceral lesson in the here and now. Picture British actor Damian Lewis reading George Orwell’s final musings—his letters, essays, diaries—with an almost clinical cadence. These reflections are layered over raw, jarring images: Gaza in ruins, Donald Trump’s distorted truths, and the online mechanics of misinformation that enable our tendencies to ignore the unimaginable.

“That’s unfortunately our capacity … to forget, our capacity to repress,” says Peck, who was born in Haiti, a country shaped by authoritarian rule.

“Hitler wrote a book, Mein Kampf. He said exactly ...