Be prepared for a no-holds-barred assault on contemporary life and politics in master documentarian Raoul Peck’s biographical study of George Orwell. Etonian, policeman in colonial Burma, tramp, fugitive from Stalinism, and finally novelist who completed his masterpiece, 1984, while dying of tuberculosis: Orwell was all this and more. But Peck is interested not only in Orwell as a writer who merely chronicled the past, but as a thinker who gives us vital insights into the creeping totalitarianism of the present.

Narrated by Damian Lewis and containing clips of past fictions and contemporary material that is confrontingly real, Peck targets the demagoguery, the organised lying and the surveillance technologies that constitute the weapons wielded on us by the thought police of 2025.