The Encampments
Directed by Kei Pritsker and Michael T Workman
Watermelon Pictures, 2025.
81 min.
“Israel has traumatised us…forever,” says Bisan Owda, Palestinian journalist and activist, seated in the sand against a backdrop of tents in Gaza. This clip from Owda’s social media account is embedded early in The Encampments, a new documentary directed by Kei Pritsker and Michael T Workman. What Owda and others in Palestine endure firsthand, millions of us witness in the palms of our hands over and over and over again. How does one respond to the trauma of witnessing the Israeli military starve and massacre innocent civilians with artillery and weapons purchased with our tax dollars and school tuitions? That is the question at the heart of The Encampments.
The film tells the story of student encampments across the country, focusing at length on the encampment on the lawn of Columbia University in the spring of 2024. It shows how Columbia students and activists, like Sueda Polat, who is featured in the film, responded to the challenge presented by Owda’s video. The choice was either “to be paralysed and depressed” or take action.
The Encampments documents how a peaceful protest shook Columbia University to its core. Driven by conviction, joy, grief and celebration, the encampment inflicted irreversible damage on Columbia University’s reputation, even before any student demands were met, and helped bring the issue of Palestine to millions around the world.
Story of a movement
The film does a masterful job of showing the full story of the Columbia encampment and the activism that preceded it. Students did not start asking for Columbia University to divest by occupying the lawn, in fact the encampment became a necessary response to Columbia’s escalating repression of other peaceful protest actions. First, the University revoked Students for Justice in Palestine’s student club status. Then they stopped approving events organised by other groups to protest Palestine and push for divestment. They criminalised people who participated in protests, and did not protect them against pro-Israel aggression. They repeatedly ignored students.
When the protesters set up an encampment, they do so because they know they must “do something that couldn’t be ignored”.
The encampment is successful in disarming the university as soon as the first tent pole hits the lawn. The administration is completely unprepared and caught off guard. The encampment was fully established hours before the Columbia University President Dr Minouche Shafik’s national public hearing on antisemitism before Congress. The timing could not be more perfect. Everyone was listening to Shafik’s hearing on antisemitism. Meanwhile, all phone cameras were on the encampments.
Shafik was forced to answer questions about whether Palestinian activism is antisemitic, while the footage being shared worldwide showed protesters in hijab, in watermelon kippahs, in keffiyehs, donning large Star of David necklaces. There were Black students, brown students, white students, and Latinx students. Every tent is the same green tent, but every person is different. All are saying one message: Disclose, Divest.
It is impossible for Shafik to homogenise such a diverse student body, and she fumbled her way through the hearing. The protesters knew they were one step ahead of the administration. The encampments “interrupt the normal functions” of the campus, a protester says in the film, and “the university is on the backfoot about what they could do to stop” it.
When threats of suspension do not work, the threat of arrest comes next. Even though the administration announces that anyone who leaves the encampment will not face disciplinary consequences, the students decide instantaneously and unanimously to remain through the night.
The footage that follows is the most powerful in the documentary. Armed policemen wander between unarmed protesters and flapping tents. NYPD has armor, handcuffs, and is strapped with weapons as they tap each other’s shoulders and devise attack and arrest plans. The protesters look directly at them, undeterred and unafraid.
NYPD has every resource and weapon at its disposal. It has the support of the power structures of the university, the city, and the state. And yet, it is they who are on the defense, for they are an unexpected part of a targeted, bold, mass action of nonviolent disobedience. Every step of the process, from having to organise multiple officers to carry one non-compliant, limp body off the lawn to the processing and release of protesters from 1 Police Plaza, is not a reflection of protesters’ weakness but of their strength.
As armed officers surround the encampment, protesters clap, spin, dance, jump up and down, and chant. There is such resounding, undefeatable, palpable power on that student lawn. The footage is electric. The arrests are futile. Before dawn, the lawn is packed with community members weathering the Spring night chill in sleeping bags.
Power of the people
The film shows how the insurmountable power that students came from a community-driven commitment to a vision of liberation that is much larger than any specific, individual needs. It also comes from deep respect for the potential of the university that they call their educational home: a respect that drives their persistence in restoring the university’s moral standing in its community and in the world. Over and over again, in The Encampments, we are able to witness how community power has the force to reveal administrative hypocrisy and challenge institutional power.
For example, Sueda Polat recounts how the administration prevented water from reaching the protesters. And yet, through the power of numbers and creativity, the broader community finds ways to provide an abundance of food and resources to the protestors. In fact, there is so much food that one student protester finds herself responsible for organising it by dietary restriction and running a distribution center.
In another example, an anonymous informant in the documentary who seemed to have a significant Communications role for the administration describes how senior leadership repeatedly removed any mention of “Palestine” and “Palestinian” from statements following the October 7 attacks by Hamas and Israel’s violent offensive that followed, and allowed only the word “Hamas” to be used instead.
But while the administration may have wished to make Palestine invisible as an issue in the protest, the students’ carpeting the lawn with Palestinian flags day in and day out, naming and grieving victims day in and day out, made this impossible. Columbia University’s messaging may have intentionally ignored Palestine, but the university became a universally recognised bastion of Palestinian solidarity through the students’ brave actions.
Even Columbia University’s monopoly on education was tested as the encampment provided countless opportunities for teach-ins that reached audiences far larger than the walls of Columbia University’s classrooms. As the university criminalised the encampment, the large outdoor screening of documentaries showed activists how the generation before them pushed the university to divest from the Vietnam War and occupied Hamilton Hall to help make it happen.
When the administration tried to villainise the campus environment by repeatedly describing it as full of “tension and division”, equating cries for Palestinian liberation with antisemitism, the encampment participated in a collective singing of Havdalah for Shabbat. They listened to sermons by rabbis. They took Dabke lessons and applauded their Mariachi band members. They grieved the relatives of the protesters who had been killed every night. There was nothing that Columbia University could say or do to ostracise protestors who are international and intersectional in identity, but focused on one clear cause: divestment from Israel.
It is in the midst of this growing community momentum that the university could not keep up with, that, every morning, students and activists Mahmoud Khalil and Sueda Polat negotiated with the university. Khalil and Polat are not only students but also practitioners. Khalil’s experience in diplomacy is emphasised in the documentary in ways no mainstream media has highlighted. Polat’s particular expertise in human rights is crucial to negotiations that center on a repeated war criminal like Israel.
The negotiations were another tool the students used to reveal Columbia University’s insincerity and moral posturing. When the administration says divestment is not possible, they show them how the university has previously divested from Russia. When the administration says its divestment is complicated, Khalil and Polat offer them guidelines, a map, and a plan. Eventually, they reveal that Columbia’s rejection of divestment and disclosure is driven by the desire to remain invested in Israeli war crimes. It is not because there is no other way. It is because this is the way they seek. It is only once negotiations reach a dead end that the protesters escalate their action and occupy Hamilton Hall, renaming it Hind’s Hall.
Ultimately, by the time the administration summons the full force of the NYPD, the protesters have already proven that the university is taking students’ tuition against their consent and funding occupation, apartheid, and genocide by choice. The protesters have already proven that there is no weapon, no resource, no oppressive tool — even the withholding of food and water — that will scare students or deter them from their moral objective. And Columbia University has realised that they have no power over them. They realise that students will not only pursue divestment, but they will do it with joy and community, and celebration. The Encampment shows us there is no agony in the fight for liberation, even when there is suppression.
An end as a beginning
The Encampments leaves viewers empowered — a welcome feeling as we witness the horrific and endless butchering of civilians and destruction of homes in Gaza. This was one of the objectives in the film. Even the way it was cut translated destruction in Gaza to resistance in the United States.
For example, back to back, there is a string of footage that shows different universities in Gaza exploding and collapsing with IDF soldiers celebrating: Al-Israa University, Islamic University, Al-Azhar University, Islamic University of Gaza.
Mirroring this footage, the documentary shows encampments popping up back to back across the nation: University of California- Los Angeles, University of California- Berkeley, University of Texas- Austin, among others. Activist Layan Fuleihan reminds us all that protesters are resilient and creative and will not stop. Khalil tells us that “this the start of the decline” of the Israeli occupation in Palestine.
And though I left the film hopeful and inspired to keep pushing for an end to the ongoing injustice in Palestine, I also left with a somber reminder: there is so much I would not have known about these brave protesters — even as someone deeply invested in the liberation of Palestine — were it not for the sustained presence and camera of BreakThrough News journalist Kei Pritsker and the team that produced the film.
The film’s intimate access is invaluable given how little footage is available to us from other encampments across the country but in Pritsker’s own words he doesn’t want “people to think Columbia is exceptional” even as it received the most amount of media attention. The censorship and targeted campaigns against journalists in the US, as well as the targeted assassinations and blockades against journalists in Palestine, leaves us with the haunting realisation that despite all we see about Israel’s violence both in Palestine and abroad, there is even more that we don’t.
[Reprinted from Mondoweiss, where this article first appeared.]