Eric Blair joins the Indian Imperial Police in Burma at nineteen, an experience that curdles into the anti-colonial disgust running through his later essays, and this film traces the path from that posting to the pen name George Orwell. Dramatized reenactments carry him through poverty in Paris and London, a rifle wound in the throat during the Spanish Civil War, and the wartime BBC job he found stifling, while archival photographs and newsreel footage supply the historical backdrop. Literary scholars, biographers, and people who knew him personally appear in interview, filling in his writing habits and the political convictions that hardened after Spain into a lifelong argument against totalitarianism. The film treats "Animal Farm" and "Nineteen Eighty-Four" as the endpoint of everything that came before, connecting specific scenes and phrases back to things Orwell actually witnessed, from Stalinist propaganda to wartime censorship. The reenactments are staged with enough restraint to stay secondary to the interviews and photographs, which do most of the work of explaining how a colonial policeman became the century's clearest writer against power.