Film review, The Light Cinema, New Brighton, April 16th, 2026, by Anthony C Green
Produced and written by Raoul Peck
Narrated by Damian Lewis
Introduction
This 2025 documentary film seems to be receiving only a very limited cinema release in the UK. This single-night showing was the only one I could find locally. Consequently, the admittedly smallish theatre was packed. Hopefully, the film will soon find a wider audience through streaming and/or a physical release.
Format
Made with the full co-operation of the Orwell estate, the format of the documentary is to feature excerpts from Orwell’s writings, read by Damian Lewis accompanied by illustrative visual footage. The writings include excerpts from his novels, especially, as one might expect, from 1984, as well as Animal Farm, Burmese Days, non-fiction works like Homage to Catalonia and Down and out in Paris and London, and many of his essays and letters, right up to his very final letter before his early death, aged 46, in 1950.
Thus, we get the story of Orwell’s life and the development of his world outlook, and as a writer told in his own words.
The visuals include clips from three of the filmed versions of 1984, the BBC play production from 1954, starring Peter Cushig and reviewed by me here Review of the 1954 BBC Adaptation of Orwell’s 1984 , the 1956 American version, and the version starring John Hurt and Richard Burton released in 1984 itself. We also get clips from the animated 1950s version of Animal Farm, and from the BBC 1983 play The Crystal Spirit: Orwell on Jura (the isolated Scottish Island where Orwell wrote 1984). This latter was particularly pleasing to me, as I well remember this at the time of broadcast and have been searching for a means of watching it again in full for years. Sadly, it still doesn’t seem to exist anywhere.
We also get to see rare photographs of Orwell, from infancy onwards, supplied by the Orwell estate.
But the bulk of the visuals are either historical in nature, of Hitler, Stalin, Mao etc, and especially relatively modern footage, up to and including 2024, all designed to show the prescience of Orwell as a writer, of his continuing relevance today.
Positives
For the most part, the format works superbly well, and some of the footage is very powerful. For instance, the beating of natives by British police in Burma/Myanmar, in which Orwell served as a low-level operative of the British Empire, and documented in Burmese Days, a period that made him a staunch anti-imperialist for the rest of his life, and the public hanging of Nazi collaborators in, from memory, France, accompanied by cheering crowds, just as such executions were greeted in 1984.
Orwell was one of the greatest of all English writers. We can’t quite hear his voice itself because, sadly, despite the very many BBC broadcasts he made on behalf of the coalition government during the Second World War, not a single recording of his voice has survived, or as yet to be recovered. Given that we can hear Oscar Wilde resighting The Ballad of Reading Gaol from a half-century before, and even the voice of Queen Victoria, this is surprising, so we can live in hope that one day the real voice of Orwell may be unearthed from somewhere, just as two long-long lost episodes of Doctor Who and first film appearance of Oliver Hardy were recently recovered from private film collections by British charity Film Is Fabulous.
In any case, in the narration of Lewis we get the next best thing, and he does it well, sounding as we might expect Orwell to have sounded, allowing us to suspend disbelief and imagine that we are hearing the voice of Orwell himself.
And every word we hear did indeed come directly from Orwell, revealing his continued relevance as a writer and social commentator.
He was both very much of his time and out of this time. A very English radical with whom one can have their political differences, as I certainly do, especially over Spain and his death-bed fingering of British fellow writers for being potential or actual communist sympathisers to MI5, while still appreciating him as a writer whose politics came from the right place, from his essential decency as a human being.
Of the footage, the parts towards the end which reveal the extent that the corporate media in the West has been concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, and has essentially become the mouthpiece of a corrupt political elite which essentially funded and maintained by the same small group of people perhaps hits home hardest.
Negatives
I’m not sure all of the modern-day examples designed to heed Orwell’s warnings about Totalitarianism worked quite so well. Indeed, there was a certain irony about some of these choices.
I can’t quite remember the quotation, and I’m paraphrasing, but someone once sad that the most effective forms of propaganda is that which is invisible to its intended recipients. We don’t see it and accept it as normal, in the same way that fish can have no concept of water. Water to a fish simply the world.
This idea is, I think, referenced in the film, and yet, taken as a whole, I thought the documentary almost took for granted that a left-liberal-worldview is a normality that should be defended, and that any challenge to this, however mild, has the potential to evolve into the form of totalitarianism which we hear Orwell repeatedly warning against.
Thus, as well as the obvious choices of the usual pantheon of ‘evil dictators’, we see footage of largely innocuous modern populist politicians such as Meloni, Le Pen, and Orban defending traditional ideas of the family that were taken for granted by virtually all until only a few years ago (and still are by most).
From my perspective, the difficulty many mainstream politicians have had in recent years in defining fairly self-explanatory concepts such as the definition of a woman, or the mangling of the English language to suit the sensitivities of small groups of self-appointed LGBT+ leaders through the introductions of pronouns like ‘They-Them’ would seem to be the very epitome of Newspeak as articulated by Orwell. The film seems to ignore this and to concentrate on alleged demagogic populism as the danger, ignoring the possibility that liberalism itself can be every bit as totalitarian as socialism or nationalism.
There is also far too much Trump. There are very many reasons to be anti-Trump in this time of the war on Iran, but just as McCarthyism in the early 1950s introduced the concept of ‘Premature anti-Fascism’ as a means of damning American radicals as communists, this film was made before the current war, and there were legitimate reasons for supporting Trump in 2024 in the hope of rolling back the rise of a totalitarian form of liberalism.
There is also evidence that the 2020 election was indeed stolen, and that the January 6th demonstrations only took a violent turn through FBI infiltration (as the Iranian protests of December 2025-January 2026 turned towards violence through the infiltration of, and supply of weaponry by Mossad.) It’s taken for granted here that it was the January 6th protesters in Washington who represented a threat to democracy.
There’s also too much Putin. Putin is an authoritarian, undoubtedly, but not a Totalitarian. Political debate happens in Russia. The term used by Putin to categorise their ongoing action in Ukraine, the Special Military Operation, is presented as a mere euphemism for war, and used as an example of how Newspeak is alive and well in the modern world. All I can say, is that the issue is not so black and white. The Russia-Ukraine conflict didn’t begin in February 2022, and I suspect Orwell would have been aware of this, and would have highlighted it, had he been alive today.
There is footage of the devastation caused by Israel in Gaza, but again, no indication that the Israel-Palestine conflict has much deeper roots.
The inclusion of criticism of the state of Israel in the modern IHRA definition of antisemitism is also, rightly, referenced as a modern example of the use of Newspeak. But there nothing about the power of the Zionist lobby within the modern body-politic, especially in America.
A few lines by Orwell about how the British ruling class often spends its time on stupid frivolities are accompanied by footage of Richard Branson taking a space pleasure-trip. But there is nothing about some of the far darker activities of what is increasingly being dubbed The Epstein Class; and the files were already well-known at the time the film was being made.
I think Orwell would have had a lot to say about the descent from frivolity to debauchery and outright evil by a corrupt globalist elite.
There are also sections about the dangers of misinformation being spread by an unregulated alternative media, including social media. Of course, this does happen, and with the spread of AI generated content it’s getting harder and harder to sift through platforms like X and make a judgement as to what is and isn’t true. But without such platforms, and the availability of dissident podcasts on platforms like You Tube and Rumble, we would be completely at the mercy of the corporate media as regards access to information. Had he been around today, I’m sure that Orwell, who was never comfortable about being a paid mouthpiece of British propaganda through his wartime BBC broadcasts, as is made clear in the film, would have been one of those alternative Oline voices.
The most glaring omission of all for me was the absence of any mention at all of the covid-lockdowns, perhaps the biggest, in global scale, exercise in mass brainwashing ever seen; and this happened only five-six years ago.
We close with the famous quote from 1984 that ‘If there is hope, it lies in the proles,’ accompanied by footage of striking nurses on a picket line. A hopeful place to stop, but to damn any form of mass, populist action as potentially totalitarian as happens earlier in the film, seems to me to be a contradiction.
Conclusion
I’m perhaps being over critical. There’s a lot here, in a two-hour film, to digest in a single sitting. I hope to see it again soon in the not-too-distant future, and I recommend it to anyone interested in Orwell, in politics, or simply in the art of documentary filmmaking.
Anthony C Green, April 2026
Picture credit: By Neon – http://www.impawards.com/2025/orwell_two_plus_two_equals_five.html, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=80887431
