‘The Encampments': Behind the scenes at Columbia's student protests

Washington Post

03-04-2025

'The Encampments' hits theaters with the kind of PR money can't buy. One of the voices of resistance to the war in Gaza featured in the new documentary — which goes behind the scenes at the protests that roiled the campuses of Columbia University and other colleges last spring — is Mahmoud Khalil.
That's a name you may have heard. Born in a Syrian refugee camp to Palestinian parents, Khalil, who received his master's degree from Columbia's school of international affairs last semester, was one of the student leaders of the protest and a negotiator between students and the school administration. On March 8, he was arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. Despite having a green card and being married to an American citizen, deportation proceedings have been initiated against him.
But his backstory, in which Khalil explains his journey from refugee camp to campus activism, is only a small part of 'The Encampments,' which arrives in the choppy wake of last month's thematically similar documentary 'October 8.' Co-directed by Kei Pritsker and Michael T. Workman, 'The Encampments' aims, among other things, to counter that earlier film's narrative about spiking campus antisemitism in the aftermath of Hamas's attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. To do so, the directors of 'The Encampments' focus on the organizers of Columbia's protest, including student spokesperson Sueda Polat and Grant Miner, a Columbia grad student and president of the Student Workers of Columbia union.
As they characterize it, the initial 14-day protest — a kind of sit-in or tent city centering on demands that Columbia divest from weapons manufacturers and defense contractors with ties to Israel — was more about kumbaya moments than bomb-throwing. Although it eventually devolved into some violent clashes with pro-Israel counterprotesters, the encampment, organizers say, was a mostly peaceful gathering of people from all religious and ethnic backgrounds, with hardly a rude word spoken.
'Where are the sound bites of people saying antisemitic things?' asks one of the film's subjects, a worker in Columbia's communications office who appears on camera with his face obscured and voice altered, presumably because he disagreed with the university's handling of the protests. Never mind the ample evidence that there were such encounters.
The film's vibe of harmony — at least inside the encampment, where leaders claim antisemitism had no home — seems more than a little stage-managed, if not whitewashed. Students in yarmulkes are shown side by side with those in kaffiyehs. Singers deliver an impromptu rendition of the Mexican folk song 'Cielito Lindo,' a woman hands out free chicken wraps. It's 'We Are the World,' against a backdrop of tense negotiation.
There is, however, a kernel of truth in there. Despite accusations of rampant antisemitism by some Jewish students, faculty and others, the documentary points to a surprising number of Jews among the protesters, including Miner, a PhD candidate who was ultimately expelled for his role in the protest. Jewish Voice for Peace, a leftist group in solidarity with Palestinians, was one of the main protest organizers, Miner notes.
Miner also offers a provocative explanation of why some Jews may say they felt unsafe, and how their voices have been amplified. 'There's a certain minority of students who feel threatened by the very presence of people who are advocating for stopping a genocide,' Miner says. 'And those people are listened to much, much more than the majority of the people who are advocating for cutting ties with a genocidal regime.' It's an argument that strays perilously close to the trope of undue Jewish influence.
In contrast to 'October 8,' Pritsker and Workman barely acknowledge that any protesters indulged in such tropes. There's an early clip of Minouche Shafik's testimony before Congress, in which Rep. Lisa C. McClain, a Michigan Republican, is shown grilling Columbia's then-president about whether she considers the chant 'From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free' to be problematic. (Some take it to be a call for the eradication of Israel.) 'Yes,' Shafik eventually concedes, after hemming and hawing. More embarrassingly, in the same clip, McClain mispronounces intifada, the Arabic word for uprising or resistance, as 'infitada.' So does Fox News host Greg Gutfeld in another sound bite.
There is one moment of heartbreaking poignancy in the film: We listen to a 2024 audio recording of a 6-year-old Palestinian girl in Gaza, Hind Rajab, speaking to an emergency dispatcher after her family's car was fired upon by what appears to have been Israeli troops. Hind was ultimately killed, along with several other family members and two paramedics who rushed to their aid. After protesters took over Columbia's Hamilton Hall, they temporarily renamed the academic building in the girl's memory. It's a stark and powerful reminder of what the protesters are actually protesting.
Too often that gets lost in 'The Encampments,' whose name, perhaps unintentionally, suggests the very conflict between factions — both armed and unarmed — that is at stake here. Labels are bandied about, without definition: Zionist, anti-Zionist, genocide, terrorism, resistance, colonialism. Too often, in a film about an ostensibly peaceful form of dissent, it feels like adversaries are being targeted, albeit subtly, when the real enemy is war itself.
Unrated. At AFI Silver Theatre. Contains scenes of violence and some coarse language. In English and some Arabic with subtitles. 82 minutes.