‘Inspiring’ Gaza Student Encampment Documentary Resets Media Narrative
A year ago this April, tens of thousands of students at more than 200 colleges and universities began pitching tents on their campus lawns. They demanded that the U.S. government pull the plug on Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and that their universities divest from companies doing business with Israel. The spark began at Columbia University and quickly spread nationwide.
The student protesters were overwhelmingly peaceful. Leading politicians from both parties from President Biden on down denounced them as violent Jew haters. The corporate media repeated these claims. For their trouble, the protesters were harassed, beaten by cops, arrested, and in some cases, suspended or expelled. A year later, the dominant narrative remains the same: that the encampments were seething cauldrons of antisemitic hatred that had to be suppressed at any cost. Thankfully, we now have a brilliant new documentary that takes you into the heart of the encampment movement and why the students were willing to risk so much for a free Palestine.
The theatrical release for The Encampments began on Thursday at the Angelika Film Center in Lower Manhattan, where the film will play for at least one week. For more, see our review below.
To see much of our Palestine/Israel coverage since October 2023, click here. To see our May 2024 issue featuring the encampment movement, click here.
This Sunday is Land Day, a day on which Palestinians publicly gather to affirm their right to return to the land that was stolen from them. We’ll be covering those protests on Indy Instagram and Indy Twitter.
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Gaza Encampments Documentary Delivers a Clear Message: The Kids Are Alright
By Sam Alcoff
Rare is the college brochure that informs potential students of the minutiae of massive university financial endowments. Today’s universities, which often hold colossal land and stock portfolios, can be giant and complicated institutions with interdisciplinary administrations straddling education in the classroom and corporate governance in management. But what’s left off during a campus tour can soon become apparent after orientation.
Students and faculty have long shined a critical spotlight on universities’ investments, which likely include stock in weapons manufacturers that profit off Israel’s apartheid. Their steady campaigns of resolutions and petitions to curtail unethical investments changed abruptly when Israel’s genocidal onslaught in Gaza exploded after October 7th. At Columbia University, exhausted by their administration’s busywork, disinterest and stalling, students took over their Manhattan quad in April 2024 and demanded better.
This is the story captured by Michael T. Workman's and Kei Pritsker’s inspiring documentary, The Encampments. A short documentary on a single campus uprising would satisfy the assignment, but The Encampments goes far and wide, and the audience is richly rewarded. The film includes archival footage of Palestinian refugee camps in Syria and of the original 1948 Nakba — the beginning of a violent ongoing process of displacing Palestinians from their homes; vivid portraits of the students, faculty, and staff across the country responding in real-time to genocide; and images of Gaza itself, where we see the crime of our time that is inspiring and fueling this movement. While the circumstances are notably different, the tents on an Ivy League lawn billow in the wind like Gaza’s displacement camps. The solidarity and courage of the students are contagious.
Deftly cutting between right-wing politicians, like New York City Mayor Eric Adams, spouting hysterical talking points and the students that make up the movement — some Palestinian, some Jewish, all educated and often creative and funny — the film quickly reframes the tired critiques of uneducated fools and outside agitators.
The Jewish presence in the film, to this reviewer, is familiar and heart-warming: Jewish students, rabbis, and teachers coming together in defense of Gaza under a rallying cry of Never Again.
All of the students, from the wry Grant Miner to the incendiary Sueda Polat, excel, but the star is Palestinian graduate student Mahmoud Khalil. Abducted and held captive by the Trump administration in early March, Khalil is currently a rallying point as supporters around the country protest his threatened deportation. On screen, soft-spoken and clear, his true crime is revealed: He is a young man asking his university to not profit in the genocide of his people, calling his school to blossom into a more moral community, and openly and defiantly negotiating for a fair outcome to the impasse. Khalil’s treatment by both administrations of Columbia and Trump reflects a deep failing of our larger society.
The film gets an easy A, but there’s a catch. It comes with homework: organize.
The Encampments
Directed by Michael T. Workman and Kei Pritsker
Watermelon Pictures/Breakthrough Media, 2025
81 minutes
