There’s a moment in Raoul Peck’s latest documentary Orwell: 2+2=5 when a photo of George Orwell as an infant appears on screen. The black-and-white portrait shows a never-named Indian caretaker cradling Orwell, then known as Eric Arthur Blair, in her arms. When Peck first came across the photo, which was taken in 1903, he recognized it instantly. “Everything behind that image, I knew from Haiti, from Congo, from any countries of the third world,” the Haitian director said after an early October 2025 screening of Orwell.

Dozens of people had gathered at the IFC Center in New York City on a warm fall evening to hear Peck and the documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney, one of the film’s producers, discuss Orwell. The pair’s jocular banter helped temper the crowd, which seemed slightly on edge. This film, like many of Peck’s projects, exhumes the past in order to hold up a mirror to the present. In the case of Orwell, viewers must confront the parallels between our fascist reality and the English writer’s dystopian visions.

Orwell, which premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival to critical praise, is part biography and part unsettling political appraisal. Peck organizes the documentary around the last years of Orwell’s life, when he spent much of his time at a farmhouse on the Scottish island of Jura writing his final novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Using Orwell’s letters, essays, diary entries, and books, Peck constructs a compelling narrative, read by the actor Damian Lewis, that illuminates the writer’s personal life, literary concerns, and political awakenings. A rich selection of archival material — clips from documentaries and dramas, excerpts from screen adaptations of Nineteen Eighty-Four, and striking graphics — punctuate the film, adding necessary texture to what could have been a perfunctory biographical account.

When Gibney approached Peck about making an Orwell documentary, the Haitian filmmaker was enthusiastic but wary. Peck, whose filmography includes charged political dramas and experimental documentaries, told me that he requires an organic entry point into a project. While the director was familiar with Orwell’s work, he worried he wouldn’t be able to naturally connect with the writer. But finding the image of an infant Orwell with his Indian caretaker clarified Orwell’s position within a colonial order familiar to Peck, who came to appreciate how the writer’s work revealed a deep understanding of power and propaganda. “All those concepts that he was able to develop were not those of an intellectual sitting back in his office,” Peck said at the IFC event. These were the ideas of someone who had been born into the colonial system, at one point helped enforce it (Orwell served as an imperial officer in Burma), and later campaigned against it. The image became so important to Peck that it appears twice in the film, once at the beginning and again at the end.

Peck had been making films for decades before his breakthrough James Baldwin documentary I Am Not Your Negro came out in 2017. The project debuted during a pivotal time in U.S. history and brought him greater attention, in addition to an Oscar nomination. I Am Not Your Negro relies on rich archival footage and excerpts from Baldwin’s unfinished memoir, read beautifully by Samuel L. Jackson, to sketch a biographical portrait of the late 20th-century writer and lay bare the violence still undergirding much of American life. At the time of its release, former President Barack Obama had just exited office, and Donald Trump entered it for the first time. Organizers around the country were trying to make sense of the Black Lives Matter movement, which was radicalizing a new generation of activists and thinkers. Peck’s film met the urgency of this moment by finding a throughline between Baldwin’s writing and present-day politics. Its acclaim helped build a larger audience for Peck’s work. Both old and new admirers came to anticipate compelling storytelling, an exciting use of the archives, and rigorous analysis of contemporary sociopolitics from the director’s projects.

After the success of I Am Not Your Negro, Peck went on to release the historical drama The Young Karl Marx; Exterminate All the Brutes, a capacious if unsteady television series on how colonialism has shaped the world; the stirring but more conventionally structured documentary Silver Dollar Road, on a Black family’s yearslong fight to hold on to its land in North Carolina; an engrossing documentary about one of the first Black South African photographers to document apartheid, Ernest Cole: Lost and Found; and now a smart portrait of Orwell. All of these works reflect the director’s uncompromising vision and inquisitive approach to filmmaking. But calling Peck just a political director minimizes his achievement, allowing people to ignore the artistic merits and intellectual rigor of the work. Peck is more like a modern griot, a filmmaker who has made an art of his archival excavations. He reconstitutes the past in order to combat historical erasure, and in his films — like the work of the anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot and the literary scholar Saidiya Hartman — the archives are a contested site, an arena in which power can be reclaimed.

This has been especially evident in Peck’s recent projects, which share a similar structure. I Am Not Your Negro, Ernest Cole, and Orwell all feature a script — assembled from books, memoirs, diaries, letters, and the like — that revive the voice of a historical figure. The text is then reinforced by images, also pulled from various places within the archive. Peck’s projects are an exercise in what Hartman has termed critical fabulation, using not only the archives but their absences and silences to re-present history. This is most apparent in Exterminate All the Brutes, in which Peck uses archival evidence and fictional vignettes to recast the history of the Western world as one of greed and destruction, thereby challenging dominant narratives of morally sanctified winners and primitive losers. He is committed to accessing versions of the past that prioritize the people’s struggle.

The day before his event at IFC, Peck reiterated his longstanding interest in archival possibilities. We were sitting in a conference room tucked in the corner of the SoHo offices of Neon, the company that distributed Orwell. “I had to deconstruct the existing archive made by the colonies and find a way to work with it,” Peck, now 72, said of his methods. “I use video; I use photos; I use print; I use everything to re-create my own past visually.” He made clear that he has no problem taking what he needs; to the artist, history belongs to us all. “I have the right to appropriate myself the universal culture,” he said.

In many ways, Peck’s work and methodology have never been more important. The latest chapter of fascist progression in the United States involves rewriting history. Since January 2025, the Trump administration has engaged in an alarming revisionism, removing materials from federal property and land that do not serve a white supremacist agenda, including, but not limited to, acknowledgments of slavery in America and the civil rights movements of Black and LGBT+ people. This is just the first step in rolling back the progress of these efforts. With their focus on how violent politics have shaped and instigated some of the most brutal chapters in world history, Peck’s films offer audiences tools to recognize and articulate what’s happening and highlight the risks of ignoring these dangerous shifts.

Although he includes autobiographical interventions in some of his films, Peck is reluctant to talk about himself. He is particularly allergic to the contemporary impulse to use biography as an excuse or to position oneself as exceptional in service of careerism, saying, “Don’t sell me your soul because you want to sell me a product.”

“I use myself to make a point, but it’s not about me,” he told me when I asked about his early years. “Myself as a person, it is not interesting.” Others might disagree. Peck was born in Port-au-Prince in 1953, a few years before François Duvalier began his brutal reign over Haiti. In 1962, when Peck was 8 years old, his family relocated to Kinshasa (then known as Léopoldville), the capital of what is now called the Democratic Republic of the Congo, to join his father. Hébert B. Peck had moved to the central African country the previous year, after being arrested and accused of inciting workers to strike in Haiti. The contours of Duvalier’s corruption had become clear by 1961, when he manipulated the election to extend his term. The elder statesman who preferred to go by Papa Doc declared himself president for life in 1964.

In central Africa, Peck found himself “discovering new faces, new smells,” he said. His family arrived during the height of the decolonization movement in Africa, a thrilling period in which former colonized nations broke from imperial powers and achieved self-governance. Ghana led the sub-Saharan pack, achieving independence in 1957, followed by Guinea, Cameroon, Senegal, and Nigeria in subsequent years. The Democratic Republic of Congo gained independence in the summer of 1960. Peck’s father worked for the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization and UNESCO, while his mother was a mayoral aide in Kinshasa. They were part of a coterie of émigrés tasked with helping the young nation develop and occupied a unique place in Congolese society somewhere between the white Belgians and the Indigenous population. While living in Kinshasa, Peck became familiar with the leaders of these revolutionary movements, from Kwame Nkrumah and Sékou Touré to Patrice Lumumba. Lumumba would be the subject of two of Peck’s films, the incredible 1991 documentary Lumumba: Death of a Prophet and an eponymous narrative drama from 2000.

Then Peck’s family was exiled again, leaving Africa for North America. “There were problems in Congo, so the United Nations evacuated us,” the director explained matter-of-factly. He spent a year in Flatbush, Brooklyn, where his Caribbean, Chinese, and Jewish neighbors made up “sort of a melting pot,” he said. Although Peck was gaining an informal education through these new environments, the peripatetic manner of his formal schooling worried his parents. After his family eventually moved back to Congo, he was sent to boarding school in France as a young teenager. “That was hard at the beginning because you want to be with your parents,” he said, but the rupture made him more independent. In France, he encountered a more pronounced racism, reflected in clichéd prejudices and calcified class distinctions. All of this made him, at the time, uninterested in considering a future there. “I didn’t want to stay in a country where my place was either already assigned or inexistent,” he said.

After finishing his baccalaureate, Peck studied economics and engineering at the Technical University of Berlin. It was the ’70s — the Wall hadn’t fallen, and West Berlin was a hub of countercultural energy. Peck concentrated his studies on development and hung out with other diasporic students. “All my friends,” he said, “were either from a liberation movement or they were in exile.” These young people dedicated their lives to furthering collective freedom regardless of personal sacrifice, including romantic relationships. Peck primarily organized with the Friends of Cuba and Haitian solidarity organizations that he declined to name. He said that for members, “the order was no private connection if you know you’re going to die.” Peck does not speak publicly about the family he has made as an adult, preferring to leave his private life as a silence in the archive around which the critic must swerve.

After university, Peck moved back to New York, where he thought he had a job with the United Nations’ Development Agency lined up. He’d already interviewed for the role, but then the organization made budget cuts. Peck became a taxi driver instead. After about eight months of driving passengers around the city, he decided to commit himself to cinema. “I knew exactly what I wanted to do, and I could, like Orwell said, ally politics and art,” he said, “and that was liberating.” In 1981, after only a year in the city, Peck returned to Berlin and enrolled in the German Film and Television Academy Berlin.

Seven years after entering the program, Peck premiered his narrative feature debut, Haitian Corner, at the Berlin International Film Festival. The film follows an exiled Haitian poet living in New York while haunted by memories of his imprisonment under the Duvalier regime in Port-au-Prince. Obsessed with finding his torturer, the poet falls into a kind of fugue state, losing his day job while alienating friends and family. Haitian Corner wrestles with questions of memory and morality, frequent themes in Peck’s oeuvre. The film opens with a montage of fictional former political prisoners, based on real-life interviews conducted by Peck. This and other docu-realist elements — the verité camerawork and black-and-white flashback scenes — reflect his interest in borrowing from different forms in order to create work that better serves Black life and history.

But it was Peck’s second feature-length film, Lumumba: Death of a Prophet, that fully demonstrated the kind of techniques he would go on to use in his later works. The documentary combines personal memoir, investigative reporting, and archival footage to render the martyred political leader’s history and the challenges of Congolese independence as a ghost story. Using his family’s relocation to Kinshasa in the ’60s as an entry point, Peck begins by painting an inspiring portrait of Lumumba’s crucial role in his people’s self-determination. He then shows how the charismatic leader’s untimely and gruesome death (Lumumba’s body was reportedly dissolved in acid and never found) prematurely ended a burgeoning freedom movement and turned Lumumba into a restless specter, revealing the contradictions of the West and haunting the intertwined history of Belgium and the Congo. Like Peck’s later films, Death of a Prophet features a voice-over narrative, written and read by the filmmaker himself, that guides viewers through its beats. In it he makes connections — linking Belgium’s mining avarice and Cold War paranoia to show how Congolese independence was never taken seriously in the West — and draws conclusions that would take decades to gain traction. Peck had originally set out to direct a feature about Lumumba, but a lack of coherent information compelled him to make a documentary first. Western history had not memorialized the Congolese minister fondly. “He was considered some sort of crazy political leader,” Peck said. “I had to take almost two years to really discover who he was.”

That hunger for discovery drives all of Peck’s projects, from the political drama he eventually did make about Lumumba to The Man by the Shore, his heartbreaking 1993 feature about a young girl’s experience of François Duvalier’s reign. But then, he told me a month after we first met, “I abandoned cinema with the risk of never being able to do another film” when Prime Minister Rosny Smarth nominated him to become Haiti’s minister of culture in 1996. As he tells it, he had always kept a foot in the country’s political and cultural conversations, and he saw the role as an opportunity to enact real change. “I gave my energy to my country, not knowing what’s going to happen,” Peck told me.

We were sharing a pot of tea in the lobby of the Roxy Hotel, surrounded by the din of moviegoers, diners, and hotel guests. Peck was in the middle of Oscar-campaigning season for Orwell, which disappointingly did not even make the documentary shortlist. The job as minister of culture was exciting — Peck says he enjoyed expanding Haiti’s public radio and television programming — but it also meant abandoning his art and surviving on a meager salary by living at his aunt’s house. “That was a hard time for me,” he said. “And unless you go into corruption, you don’t have enough money.” After 18 months in the job, Peck resigned from his post, following Smarth, who left after accusing the government of rigging elections to favor supporters of former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Haiti had no prime minister for the next two years.

In the decades that followed, Peck shifted between documentary and narrative filmmaking, using lessons he learned from one to enhance his direction of the other. “He pays great attention to the subject and really immerses himself, but then at some point, he figures out how to tell a story with a certain kind of rigor,” Gibney told me recently. He described Peck’s filmmaking style as that of a “good jazz band.” The two met a decade ago at an I Am Not Your Negro event and became friends. Standing more than six feet tall and possessing a dignified air, the Haitian director “can be an imposing figure,” Gibney said. “I think people, as a result, don’t think that he’s got a sense of humor, but he has a very sort of wacky sense of humor.”

Over the years, the pair bonded over their shared commitments “to cinema but also to politics or moral inquiries, as I like to call them,” said Gibney. They also talked about collaborating. When Gibney got a call from Universal, which had recently acquired the rights to make a documentary from Orwell’s estate, he thought Peck would be perfect for the project. The Haitian director’s cosmopolitan upbringing would allow him to frame Orwell’s story in an unexpected way, Gibney said: “He would be compelled by the themes of colonialism, the colonizers versus the colonized, and also the sense of rich and poor.”

Gibney was right. While there are no explicit autobiographical elements in Orwell, Peck’s personal interventions are all over the work. The film opens with Lewis reading aloud a quote from Orwell’s 1946 essay “Why I Write” that echoes the Haitian director’s own approach to filmmaking: “When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I’m going to produce a work of art.’ I write because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention.”

Peck also sets out to expose and draw attention, creating elegant inquisitions into the past. The archives are his words, cinema is his grammar, and politics is the message. When the filmmaker was making Sometimes in April, a narrative film about the Rwandan genocide, he says he saw himself as a collector of memory and artifacts. Peck chose to tell the story from the perspective of two Hutu brothers who end up on opposing sides: Augustin is a military man married to a Tutsi, and his brother Honoré is an on-air host for Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines, the pro-Hutu propaganda station that helped foment the genocide. Peck fought for the film to be shot in Rwanda and hired survivors of the genocide as the cast and crew, encouraging them to remember their side of the story in a way that felt safe. He also visited specific sites, from the churches where people were massacred to the Nyabarongo River, where bodies were dumped. “It’s almost documenting even though it’s a fiction film,” he said. Peck prioritized accuracy and authenticity with the hope that young Rwandans can watch the film 50 years later and see a meaningful articulation of their history. His approach echoes the theories of Trouillot, the Haitian academic who argues in his book Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History that the production of the past is never neutral and that “any historical narrative is a particular bundle of silences.” With Sometimes in April, Peck aimed to reveal how Western countries ignored and dismissed the violence happening in Rwanda, thereby facilitating 100 days of murder and erasing history even as it was taking place.

A significant part of shaping previously buried historical narratives happens in the editing room. Peck’s longtime editor Alexandra Strauss describes the process like a game of Ping-Pong. She has been working with Peck since Fatal Assistance, the 2013 documentary about Haiti in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake, and calls their partnership a mutual act of discovery. First the production team gathers a trove of images, and then they begin sifting through them; a narrative emerges from these early sessions, which helps clarify the direction of the film. “I get ideas, and then he gets ideas,” Strauss told me over Zoom. The goal is to maintain a balance between the visuals — you never want too many photographs or videos or black-and-white images — to create something that has a rich and subtle relationship to the scripted text.

Making films with artistic and intellectual integrity for nearly four decades hasn’t been easy. “Hollywood is not progressive,” Peck said, although people there “pretend to be.” He has always produced or co-produced his films through his company Velvet Film, which he founded in 1986 in Berlin and is now based in Paris. Despite his unhappy experience of France, Peck moved back after the fall of the Berlin Wall. “I didn’t like what Berlin was becoming: a city suddenly colonized by money, bad energy, and politics,” he said. Still, he considers Paris more of a “fallback place,” a base from which he can conveniently work and travel between France, Germany, and the United States. Early in his career, Peck caught on quickly to the unspoken rules of the filmmaking game. “I realized how I was obliged to find a way to sell a project to the white establishment,” he said. Even now, after building an international reputation, he struggles to get projects greenlighted. He said he and other Black filmmakers “have to beg and beg and beg, when others have $200 million to do their movies.” During our meeting in the fall of 2025, Peck spoke at length about how his screenplay about the Haitian Revolution, which he’d been working on for 25 years, was “politely” turned down by Apple, which said it had too similar a project in the pipeline. Peck speculates that it was Ridley Scott’s derisively reviewed Napoleon, starring Joaquin Phoenix. (Apple TV declined to comment.)

Over the years, Peck has learned not to rely on the industry — where fortunes change according to trends, panicked financiers, and the political context — and to be led instead by what moves him. In the case of Orwell, he found, through the photo of Orwell as a baby in the hands of his caretaker, that he and the English writer shared a similar language about and attitude toward colonialism. “He had the same kind of reaction I had, and he knew who the other was,” Peck told me. Orwell and his family left India for England the year after his birth. Sent to a series of prestigious boarding schools, a young Orwell quickly learned about the character of the powerful. “I lived in a world of boys, gregarious animals questioning nothing, accepting the law of the stronger,” says Lewis as Orwell in the film, and “avenging their own humiliations by passing them down to someone smaller.” After leaving Eton College in 1921, Orwell joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, which only increased his skepticism and hatred of authority. Those years of service and his experience of the Spanish Civil War in 1936–37 permanently changed him. He dedicated his life to political writing and effectively became an outsider to the colonial establishment he was born into.

Despite the obvious differences between Orwell’s and Peck’s upbringings, the two do share some similarities. Perhaps the most striking is how both writer and filmmaker rejected their historically mandated positions. Orwell was determined not to become a tool of empire, while Peck refused to remain its subject. Their respective journeys reveal that while much of one’s life can be determined by the violent capitalist system and your place within it, understanding and critiquing its histories have the power to change your relationship to its present and future. For Peck, this has meant leaning on archival cinema to uncover new or previously buried historical threads. “I had to create my place,” he said. “Creating your place means you don’t put yourself in a position where you can be hostage or you can be pressured or forced to compromise.”

Lovia Gyarkye is an editor at Hammer & Hope. Her writing has appeared in The Nation, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Dissent, and Aperture. She won an ASME Next Award for Journalists under 30 in 2024 and teaches in the arts and culture program at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York.

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