Rare is the college brochure that informs potential students of the minutiae of massive university financial endowments. Today’s universities, which often hold colossal land and stock portfolios, can be giant and complicated institutions with interdisciplinary administrations straddling education in the classroom and corporate governance in management. But what’s left off during a campus tour can soon become apparent after orientation.
Students and faculty have long shined a critical spotlight on universities’ investments, which likely include stock in weapons manufacturers that profit off Israel’s apartheid. Their steady campaigns of resolutions and petitions to curtail unethical investments changed abruptly when Israel’s genocidal onslaught in Gaza exploded after October 7th. At Columbia University, exhausted by their administration’s busywork, disinterest and stalling, students took over their Manhattan quad in April 2024 and demanded better.
This is the story captured by Michael T. Workman’s and Kei Pritsker’s inspiring documentary, The Encampments. A short documentary on a single campus uprising would satisfy the assignment, but The Encampments goes far and wide, and the audience is richly rewarded. The film includes archival footage of Palestinian refugee camps in Syria and of the original 1948 Nakba — the beginning of a violent ongoing process of displacing Palestinians from their homes; vivid portraits of the students, faculty, and staff across the country responding in real-time to genocide; and images of Gaza itself, where we see the crime of our time that is inspiring and fueling this movement. While the circumstances are notably different, the tents on an Ivy League lawn billow in the wind like Gaza’s displacement camps. The solidarity and courage of the students are contagious.
Deftly cutting between right-wing politicians, like New York City Mayor Eric Adams, spouting hysterical talking points and the students that make up the movement — some Palestinian, some Jewish, all educated and often creative and funny — the film quickly reframes the tired critiques of uneducated fools and outside agitators.
The Jewish presence in the film, to this reviewer, is familiar and heart-warming: Jewish students, rabbis, and teachers coming together in defense of Gaza under a rallying cry of Never Again.
Watermelon Pictures
All of the students, from the wry Grant Miner to the incendiary Sueda Polat, excel, but the star is Palestinian graduate student Mahmoud Khalil. Abducted and held captive by the Trump administration in early March, Khalil is currently a rallying point as supporters around the country protest his threatened deportation. On screen, soft-spoken and clear, his true crime is revealed: He is a young man asking his university to not profit in the genocide of his people, calling his school to blossom into a more moral community, and openly and defiantly negotiating for a fair outcome to the impasse. Khalil’s treatment by both administrations of Columbia and Trump reflects a deep failing of our larger society.
The film gets an easy A, but there’s a catch. It comes with homework: organize.
The Encampments
Directed by Michael T. Workman and Kei Pritsker
Watermelon Pictures/Breakthrough Media; 2025; 81 minutes
Debuts in theaters on March 27 at Angelika Film Center
