San Francisco Frontiers - Trump turning US into authoritarian regime, says Emmy winner

Raoul Peck -- who also won an Emmy for "I Am Not Your Negro", his acclaimed portrait of Black American writer James Baldwin -- told AFP that "all the signs are there, all the facts are there, where every section of society is attacked.

"I hope Americans will realise that they are already in an authoritarian regime," said the New York-based Haitian filmmaker.

"Journalism is attacked. Justice is attacked. The truth is attacked. All the elements that build a democratic society are under attack," he added, saying that Orwell had warned us how it would happen in his novels "1984" and "Animal Farm".

"But we still have people saying, 'Oh, they just came for the neighbour, but I'm fine. And no, it's not us, it's Harvard, it's Columbia'," referring to the US universities which have come under attack from the White House.

But Orwell and history have taught us that people are always slow to realise that their freedom is being taken away, Peck said.

"That's how dictatorship implements itself in society. It terrorises," he said.

Peck said the parallels between how academics are now under attack in the United States and the thought police of Orwell's last book were striking.

"When you fear to voice your opinion at work, at school, in your everyday life, and God forbid, in public. What do you call that?" he asked.

"Orwell: 2+2=5" follows the dying British writer through the last years of his life as he struggled to finish "1984" in a remote farmhouse on the Scottish island of Jura as he died of tuberculosis.

- 'Big Brother is watching you' -

Peck sees it as Orwell's last warning to the world, exhausting himself typing it from his bed as he gasped for air.

"Orwell has an almost allergic reaction to any attempt at authoritarianism," he said. He had seen it with Stalin and witnessed it first-hand in the Spanish Civil War in which he fought for the defeated republicans against the dictator Francisco Franco.

The filmmaker said Orwell knew the mechanisms of oppression intimately having worked as a colonial policeman in Burma and then seen fascism and Stalinism tighten their grip on Europe.

"Whole populations were groomed... You scare them. You take them one by one. You go against a judge. You go against lawyers, scholars... You go against public radio, a guy at the CIA. So the whole system becomes a shambles.

"Orwell also predicted a type of internet with mass surveillance through screens" -- the chilling "Big Brother is Watching You" -- and the thought police that enforced total loyalty to supreme leader.

Peck said he felt impelled to make film the film because "people know so little about Orwell" despite the huge influence he has had.

He said Orwell's works had been "spinned" by the West as an attack on Communism during the Cold War, when in fact his work was an attack on all kinds of oppression.

Having grown up in a dictatorship himself in Haiti, and seen his own father jailed, Peck said he knew how "people don't want to stick their head up when everybody seems to be lowering theirs".

But he said his greatest legacy was to question the "doublethink", where people allow themselves to be cowed and manipulated into "going along with things they know not to be true".

The film is showing out of competition at one of the most political Cannes film festival in years.

It began with a fiery speech by US actor Robert De Niro denouncing Trump as "America's philistine president" and warning that democracy there was under attack.

Peck echoed his warning, telling AFP "democracy is something you fight for every day. It's not a consumer good that you buy once for all".

Q.Nelson--SFF