‘Orwell went off to fight. I thought I’d have to do the same’: Raoul Peck on his intimate connection with the writer

The Haitian director was given unprecedented access to George Orwell’s archives – and found a fellow crusader for truth. His extraordinary new film highlights the sinister links between Big Brother, Trump and Putin

‘I must admit,” says Raoul Peck from his book-lined Parisian apartment, “George Orwell was not top of my list of authors who I thought would fit my current view of the world.” That view – anti-imperialist, intellectually curious and fiercely independent – has been shaped by an extraordinary life. Born in Haiti, Peck grew up under the notoriously violent Duvalier regimes, before his family fled in 1961. He was variously educated in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, then New York and Orléans in France before moving to Berlin, where he studied industrial engineering and economics. He spent a year as a New York taxi driver and five as a journalist and photographer, before getting his film degree in Berlin in 1988. In 2010, he was made chair of the French state film school.

He is best known for his dramas and documentaries, which often zoom in on his intellectual heroes. He has profiled Patrice Lumumba, the DRC’s first leader; shot a drama about the friendship of the young Engels and Marx, the crucible that created communism; created a tender portrait of South African photographer Ernest Cole; and won a Bafta for his 2017 documentary about the writer James Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro. In 2021, he made Exterminate All the Brutes, a four-part TV series about colonisation and ethnic cleansing. His 2005 film Sometimes in April dramatised and explored the Rwandan genocide. No one – with the possible exception of Adam Curtis – has consistently interrogated big ideas and the structures that shape our world in a more inventive and probing way.