The Encampments: timely documentary captures the spirit of university students’ pro-Palestine protests

The Encampments uses the natural momentum of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at Columbia University in New York as its structural spine. What began with 50 students pitching tents in the campus’s designated protest zone soon became a national and international movement of students occupying campus lawns, demanding university administrations divest from Israel and weapons manufacturing. Four spokespeople for the cause become the film’s protagonists – including a Palestinian who has never set foot in Palestine and a Jewish student once taught Zionist beliefs – the combination of their intellect and personal experiences imbuing The Encampments with both a rational and emotional core. Around these four inspiring people, journalist Kei Pritsker and filmmaker Michael T. Workman build a rousing documentary.

The strength of the film is that it avoids getting caught up in polemics, instead focusing solely on the encampments and the people who led them. Student demands are presented as simple: young, educated people do not want to pay for the killing of Palestinians. The administration, however, is compromised: how can they agree to divest from companies whose representatives serve on the university board?

Interviews extend to a campus whistle-blower who worked in communications revealing that the university is a small-scale model of the wider state: in public pronouncements on the protests, the words ‘Palestine’ and ‘Palestinian’ are banned, only ‘Hamas’ is to be used, just as in the wider media reporting on the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict before 7 October, and on the identities of the countless dead, is often glaringly absent. The police commissioner for New York City and the president of Columbia appear in the film, too, but Pritsker and Workman don’t dwell on their insidious agenda, choosing rather to make this story an exemplar of Rebecca Solnit’s notion that hope is a form of activism.

There is some footage of the ash clouds from Israel’s bombing of Palestinian universities, a depressing if effective contrast to Columbia’s green lawns; and an interview with Emmy-winning Palestinian journalist Bisan Owda that remind us of what’s at stake. Archive footage of campus protests from 1968, during the Vietnam War, not only prove the university can do the right thing, but that there are precedents. Universities, the documentary posits, are – or should be – places of critical thinking and free thought. Set to a fairly relentless string score, the film is stirring and tense. But however inspiring the encampments are, these ‘Little Gazas’ remain ideological battlefields, fought over on first amendment grounds, far from the Gaza Strip.

► The Encampments is in UK cinemas from 6 June.