it's Raul Peck's Orwell 2 plus 2 equals 5, a brand new documentary. Raul Peck may be familiar to some

listeners for his recent film, I Am Not Your Negro, about James Baldwin, which was an art house

hit during the first Trump term. If you've seen that film, you'll know something of Raul Peck's

style. He makes free-flowing essay films, but ones that are straddled somewhere

between the poetic and the didactic. Heavy use of stock footage and found footage. In fact, I think

this film, Orwell 2 plus 2 equals 5, I think it's pretty much all found footage. I don't know if there's

anything that's newly shot for it. There's a lot of

footage of various adaptations of Orwell's 1984, footage of films about Orwell, as well as a lot

of news footage, a lot of the footage you've been seeing on your phone for the last 10 years,

interspersed with quotes from George Orwell. Spiritually, the film begins in 1946 when Orwell sets out to the

island of Jura to write 1984. As I said, we see scenes from adaptations of the book. We hear

excerpts from his diary while he's writing it, as well as bits and pieces of other Orwell writing.

The film is narrated by Damian Lewis in character

as Orwell. We also hear much about Orwell's life, but the Orwell of it all is sprinkled between, yeah, a kind of

fantasia, a kind of endless stream of footage, as well as the things that were relevant in Orwell's own lifetime. We see a lot

of goose-stepping Nazis. We see a lot of Soviet communists. And the thesis is not a million miles

removed from the John Meacham documentary that we talked about recently, which is everything you're

seeing now has precedent. Actually, as I say that, I realize there are kind of two

theses to this movie. One of them is that Orwell was uncannily prescient. Everything he predicted in

1984 has come true now. And then the other thesis is, this has always been around. Orwell was

just reacting to what was happening in the half

century up to the publication of that book, and we're just seeing history repeat itself. I'm very

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