The Encampments (15)
Directed by Kei Pritsker and Michael T Workman
★★★★

ON April 17 2024 nearly 50 students pitched up tents on the grounds of Columbia University in protest at Israel’s military offensive in Gaza and called on the Ivy League school to divest its links with Israel and weapons manufacturing companies.  

This gripping and eye-opening documentary directed by Kei Pritsker and Michael T Workman chronicles the birth of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment movement at Columbia and how it spread across other universities in the US to ignite an international wave of student activism. 

The protests were reminiscent of the 1968 student demonstrations at Columbia in anger at the Vietnam war. 

The film features interviews with student organisers at several encampments and also a whistleblower from high up in the administration of an Ivy League university who sheds insightful light at the mindset of the campus authorities. He reveals how he was told to retract any references to Palestinian struggles and to Palestine or even the word Palestinian in all public communications, and to just include Hamas. 

The documentary also examines why the universities responded with mass arrests and force instead of engagement and dialogue, with the students being labelled as anti-semitic for calling for a free Palestine. It shows how Columbia’s administration allowed the police to enter the campus and apprehend students for the first time in 50 years. The footage is brutal as you see officers manhandle and beat protesters who had been demonstrating peacefully. It then gave the signal for other universities to follow suit. 

The film shows how this was more than a student protest: it was a generational struggle for justice which resulted in almost 300 Gaza solidarity encampments being set up globally. And how the authorities tried to stamp out this powerful grassroots movement.  

It also includes an interview with Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian graduate who was born in a refugee camp outside of Damascus and who was chosen to negotiate directly with Columbia University. As the documentary reveals, in March this year he was apprehended and taken from his home by ICE, without a warrant or being formally charged, and was put into deportation proceedings even though he is a permanent resident. 

He wasn’t even allowed to be present at his son’s birth. This is an attempt by the Trump administration to curtail dissent and violate people’s civil rights, including freedom of speech.

A must-see for our own Palestine solidarity movement.

In cinemas June 6.