The Encampments: The documentary pushing back against ongoing lies about the Columbia student movement for Palestine

“Our documentary challenges the political and media narrative that these encampments were violent, anti-semitic places for terrorist sympathisers,” says Workman.

“We did our best to try and capture and contextualise why the students did what they did, and also show viewers what it was actually like in the encampment: a space for students to educate each other about [Israel’s present-day and decades’ old crimes against Palestine].

"It was a space to hang out, organise and sing songs, attracting people from all sorts of backgrounds: white, black, Jewish, Muslim, Christian, etc. Everyone was represented.”

"The encampments succeeded in changing the culture on campuses around the world, and in keeping people’s eye on Palestine. It boosted the conversation after six months of war and the onset of media fatigue"

The filmmakers focus on three key figures: Khalil, who articulates the group’s demands; Miner, a Jewish student and labour organiser; and Sueda Polat, a human rights graduate student whose face opens the film.

Through interviews, the three share their reasons for enrolling at Columbia, their motivations for protesting, and the principles guiding their movement.

Their demands were simple: they did not want their tuition dollars used to fund companies that profit from war. The students call for Columbia to divest from weapons manufacturers, echoing the activism of previous generations who protested the Vietnam War in Colombia.

“We hadn’t seen a national student movement of that size since the Vietnam anti-war struggle and the anti-apartheid struggle too, both of which were also major at Columbia,” says Workman.

“Globally, too, there are few parallels in the global student body. If we look at these global student movements, historically, they’re almost always on the right side of History, often in opposition to society. We saw that with anti-apartheid and Vietnam. It’s not different now.”

Workman does not think the success of the student movements should be judged by whether they got their universities to divest, or not.

“The encampments succeeded in changing the culture on campuses around the world, and in keeping people’s eye on Palestine. It boosted the conversation after six months of war on Gaza and the onset of media fatigue. In the US there has been a wider public shift in consciousness around Palestine, and the students played a huge role in this.”

“We had been filming with the students at Colombia from November 2023, so we gained the trust of the students who knew who we were, but who were nonetheless very security conscious,” shares Workman.

“They only let a few media people in to film inside the camps, and one of their rules was to immediately turn off the camera or delete files if any of the students asked us to.”

In the making of The Encampments, Pritsker and Workman witnessed and filmed the brutal police suppression of the student movement, first-hand.

“When it first got nasty, there were buses of police lined up arresting students. We’re talking about militarized NYPD on campus, zip-tying peaceful student protesters on campus and dragging them away,” says Workman.

“This outrageous spectacle of repression and violence inspired many other students to get involved. The US universities’ reaction was so misguided and unstrategic. The more they lashed out, the more the student movement grew.”

Workman says that, for many students and onlookers, the violence was a visceral learning curve into the dark realities of the US state apparatus and the facade of free speech.

“You only have freedom of speech if your words align with the US’s geopolitical interests. The students learnt that the hard way. But the fact that the government responded so forcefully to them also showed how scared the state was, something that inspired and empowered the movement,” he explains. 

Today, anti-Palestine repression on campus is only getting worse.

“Students are being deported or expelled. There are private security firms on campus. People can’t cover their faces. The repression began under Biden and is now even more severe under the Trump administration," he continues.

"Mahmoud Khalil and other students are being abducted. This issue is very alive. We hope that our film makes people think that, even if they do not agree with what the students stand for, we should at least have the basic right to freedom of speech in the US, especially on university campuses, of all places.”

The Encampments is currently being shown in cinemas across the US and will be released across UK cinemas in May, most likely.

Sebastian Shehadi is a freelance journalist and a contributing writer at the New Statesman

Follow him on X: @seblebanon