Orwell: 2+2=5 documents the ongoing relevance of George Orwell's warnings against totalitarianism, proving that the Orwellian prophecy has already taken shape around us.

Seventy-seven years ago, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four was published. An ominous warning against totalitarianism, the novel became an uncanny prophetic text, bringing into the English language neologisms that would go on to shape how authoritarian control is perceived and addressed.

Big Brother: the all-knowing, all-powerful leader to whom a population is programmatically obedient. Newspeak: the propagandistic language created by a governing party, altering reality through words. Doublethink: the simultaneous belief in contradictory ideas.

"No book is genuinely free from political bias," Orwell writes in his essay Why I Write. "The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude."

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Excerpts like this from Orwell's essays, fiction, letters and diaries form the narrative foundation of the documentary Orwell: 2+2=5. Producer Alex Gibney was given unrestricted access to Orwell's full archive, but would do nothing with the material unless it was in the directorial hands of Academy Award-winning documentarian Raoul Peck.

Orwell: 2+2=5 is a sweeping survey of totalitarian rule in our modern-day society and is based on Orwell's personal writings penned during his completion of Nineteen Eighty-Four, which happened to coincide with the author's suffering from what would become a fatal case of tuberculosis....