The propulsive rhythms of “The Encampments” would’ve been effective regardless of its release date. However, the student protest documentary’s theatrical bow — brought forward to March 28, just days after its CPH:DOX festival premiere — injects its arrival with political urgency since one of its key subjects is Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian activist detained by ICE earlier this month.
At this point, a year-and-a-half removed from the events of October 7, 2023, any documentary on the subject is likely to speak to the sentiments and biases of its intended audience. So, it ought to be no surprise that “The Encampments” is a full-throated call to pro-Palestinian activism. What makes it artistically triumphant, however, is its sense of contemporary and historical detail, owed to both footage shot by the filmmakers, as well as by the protesters themselves. In the process, co-directors Kei Pritsker (of BreakThrough News) and Michael T. Workman (the short film “Meantime”) craft a work of cinema that’s as rigorously journalistic in its arguments as it is nakedly sentimental.
It is, on one hand, a political retort to numerous overarching narratives within news and academia — some of which came to a head when Columbia University overhauled its protest policies last week, at the Trump administration’s behest — but the film also ebbs and flows like traditional drama. It’s as much about the bigger picture of the protest movement at its center, which kicked off with numerous tents on Columbia’s grounds last April, as it is a journey of institutional betrayal, of exhaustion, of exhilarating highs, and of the sense of community experienced and felt by its participants.
While tracing the establishment of the encampments across several weeks (culminating in an NYPD raid), “The Encampments” chooses a handful of students as its narrative anchors, including Khalil. The subjects’ multifaceted backgrounds — from Arab organizers to Jewish students to community Rabbis — helps weave a multicultural fabric, which becomes, at first, a subtle de facto retort to claims of the protests’ inherent antisemitism, and after a while, a very explicit one.
An unintended consequence of the film’s release date is that it now enters into a conversation with “October 8,” a recently released, Debra Messing-produced documentary that — amidst its bizarre tangents decrying DEI — hinges on the claim that the pro-Palestine student movement is more of a danger to Jewish Americans than Neo Nazis are. One of the key tools “October 8” employs is stripping both contemporary and historical context from its images, whereas the precise opposite is true of “The Encampments.”
Whether its segues feature Khalil wistfully hoping to visit Palestine (from where his grandparents were expelled in the 1940s), or students occupying Columbia’s Hamilton Hall drawing on Black student activists doing the same in 1968, in protest of the Vietnam War, the film ensures that corresponding archival images appear alongside its first-hand accounts. However, these aren’t just for logistical context. “The Encampments,” like its activist subjects, draws on historical echoes to establish the weight of the current moment. Its temporal ripples are also accompanied by geographical ones, owing to footage and harrowing sound bites sourced from Gaza, as well as interviews with Palestinian journalists on the ground, who speak on the symbolic importance of the growing U.S. consciousness around Palestinian freedom.
By imbuing the imagery of these large-scale demonstrations with emotional heft, and by allowing activists’ passionate speeches to play out in full, “The Encampments” proves both rousing and reflective. Not only is it keenly observational about the kind of detail and planning that goes into such movements (down to the logistics of food and water), but it also makes for an intimate aesthetic embodiment of what participating in a protest feels like, in all its hues.
In the film, as in real-life activist circles, each moment of disappointment spurs further commitment — just as each electrifying victory does the same. The result is a work of quiet defeats and bombastic thrills, dancing around one another until their proximity becomes overwhelming.
Grade: B+
Watermelon Pictures will release “The Encampments” in New York City theaters on Friday, March 28. It will expand to Los Angeles on Friday, April 4.
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