Synopsis:

There is no archive footage of George Orwell: not a single frame of film, no voice recordings. All that remains on record is one oil painting and a stack of photographs - potentially a problem when making a film about the writer's life and work. Instead, this film uses Orwell's own words, spoken by actor Chris Langham, to bring the man to life in this dramatised biography.

Written essays become authored documentary films shot in the style of the day; events described in diaries are 'captured' on home movies; and Movietone footage is manipulated to reveal Orwell in the trenches of the Spanish Civil War. From his education at Eton, to Burma, London and Paris, Orwell's writing - poignant and polemical, scathing and sometimes just funny - is at last caught on film.