The Encamp­ments review – inspir­ing por­trait of col­lec­tive action

With doc­u­men­taries explor­ing very recent events, film­mak­ers can source all the rel­e­vant footage and inter­views need­ed in a short peri­od of time. But con­ven­tion­al wis­dom sug­gests that the longer you spend grap­pling with your sub­ject, the greater the deliv­ery of your mes­sage. That said, the urgency of an ongo­ing issue can far out­weigh the mer­its of stick­ing to stan­dard jour­nal­is­tic practices.

A faster turn­around was nec­es­sary for Kei Pritsker and Michael T Workman’s The Encamp­ments, which arrives bare­ly a year after the spe­cif­ic stu­dent protests that it cov­ers. The film’s main focus is the Gaza Sol­i­dar­i­ty Encamp­ment on Colum­bia University’s lawn in April 2024, pres­sur­ing the New York City uni­ver­si­ty to divest from com­pa­nies man­u­fac­tur­ing weapons used by Israel that tar­get and kill Pales­tini­ans – two of the main organ­is­ing groups were Jew­ish Voice for Peace and Stu­dents for Jus­tice in Palestine.

This engross­ing doc­u­men­tary tracks organ­is­ers at Colum­bia as they’re thrust into the spot­light dur­ing their fight for divest­ment, fac­ing con­gres­sion­al pres­sure, abuse from Zion­ist counter-pro­tes­tors and, even­tu­al­ly, vio­lent police repres­sion, though not before they’ve helped to encour­age a wave of fur­ther encamp­ments at oth­er uni­ver­si­ties. Pre­sent­ing a far more clar­i­fy­ing and empa­thet­ic doc­u­ment of the peace­ful pro­test­ers’ activ­i­ties and ratio­nale than was ever per­mit­ted dur­ing the media firestorm that ensued, The Encamp­ments proves essen­tial as an exposé on wild dis­tor­tion of mes­sag­ing and the betray­al of insti­tu­tions’ pro­mot­ed values.

The film bears no signs of being a rushed job. But if the direc­tors had sat on it for longer, the bare­ly 80-minute fea­ture would like­ly have great­ly expand­ed in length thanks to still-unfold­ing devel­op­ments. Among the events laid out in adden­dums before the end cred­its is that in March 2025, ICE agents, act­ing under orders of the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­ri­ty and pre­sent­ing no war­rant, abduct­ed Mah­moud Khalil from his New York home, putting him into imme­di­ate depor­ta­tion pro­ceed­ings despite Khalil being a per­ma­nent US res­i­dent with no crim­i­nal charges.

An Alger­ian cit­i­zen of Pales­tin­ian descent, Khalil is one of the more fre­quent and warm­ly engag­ing on-cam­era pres­ences in The Encamp­ments, hav­ing been a lead nego­tia­tor in the Colum­bia protests. At time of writ­ing, Khalil is still in deten­tion but get­ting op-eds out regard­ing the break­neck ero­sion of his rights. By the time this review runs, his fate as an Amer­i­can res­i­dent could still be unde­ter­mined as the Trump admin­is­tra­tion con­tin­ues attack­ing civ­il rights, the ground­work hav­ing been laid by the Biden administration’s encour­age­ment of crack­down on peace­ful protests against geno­cide and eth­nic cleansing.

Yet there is hope: Gazan jour­nal­ist Bisan Owda is among the talk­ing heads, giv­en appro­pri­ate space in the film’s mov­ing clos­ing moments to reflect on the rip­pling glob­al awak­en­ing con­cern­ing free­dom for the Pales­tin­ian peo­ple; on the impor­tance of feel­ing, regard­less of how grad­u­al­ly, that they are not alone.

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