‘The Encampments' Review: Timely Doc Covers 2024 U.S. Campus Protests Through the Eyes of the Students

Yahoo

26-03-2025

'The Encampments' could hardly be opening on a more timely date. The documentary, which chronicles the encampments at Columbia from the students' perspective, will hit New York theaters three days after its premiere at CPH:DOX, then expand to Los Angeles a week later. In the lead-up to the film's international screening, two of its protagonists, both students at Columbia University, landed on the front pages of many newspapers: Mahmoud Khalil, arrested by ICE for protesting against the war in Gaza, and Grant Miner, who was expelled by Columbia for the same reason. The film was rushed into release for these reasons.
However, its timeliness is not the only reason to see 'The Encampments.' It is also an urgent protest film that carries the same conviction and resolve of the students who organized these demonstrations last spring. Directors Michael T. Workman and Kei Pritsker start the film with news media footage that calls the protestors 'radical,' 'extreme' and 'disgusting,' among other provocative terms. Then the filmmakers turn their lens on three students who were at the forefront of this situation. It's the classic bait-and-switch setup, designed to dispute and explain what you might have heard.
More from Variety
Lightdox Boards Monica Stromdahl's 'Flophouse America' Ahead of CPH:DOX World Premiere (EXCLUSIVE)
Putin Assassination Target Christo Grozev on Why Life Has Become Even More Dangerous: 'The Bad Guys Now Are Seen as Being OK in the U.S.'
Sex-Selective Abortions in Armenia, Moldova's Healthcare System, Infertility in Georgia, and More Explored at CPH:DOX
The film concentrates on three of the student leaders. Khalil, who is of Palestinian origin, was tasked with presenting his colleagues' demands, as the student negotiator with the university administrators. Miner, who is Jewish, was a student workers union leader. The third is Sueda Polat, a human rights graduate student whose face is the first we see.
Through front-facing camera interviews, the three talk about the reasons they joined Columbia and why they felt compelled to protest the war in Gaza. Their words are simple, straightforward and clear. Their faces carry the same emotions. They put their demands plainly: They don't want the money they pay Columbia for their education to be used to kill innocent people in Gaza. In their demand that their university not invest in corporations that make weapons, they recall the previous generations of student activists who protested against the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s — a historical linkage that the filmmakers make clear through the use of archival footage.
'The Encampments' tells this story in a linear and easily digestible way. The students started protesting, then demanded divestment from the university board of trustees, a playbook they have successfully followed before amid other conflicts in other parts of the world. When Columbia ignored all their demands, they decided to camp out on the lawns of the university. The filmmakers had open access to the campus and installed themselves close to the action within the tents the students had erected. Though the images might seem familiar to those who followed this story on social media, they take on added resonance in this context, since we see more than just short snippets or newsreels. Longer scenes take in the complete story of what was happening at Columbia at the time, with testimony from the students who led and participated in the movement.
Positioned close to the chants and to the loudspeaker proclamations, audiences are transported to the lawns and halls of Columbia, where cameras capture not just the protests but all the other actions that sustained this movement and gave it longevity: the music the students danced to, the food they shared, the poems they read. Acting as cinematographer, Pritsker moves through the tapestry of the many students in action at the encampments, the conviction on their faces filling the frame.
The editing is fast and nimble, yet slows down enough when needed to let particularly moving scenes play out in their time with no rush. The seamless cutting from the students' testimony and back to the encampments allows the story to be organically told. This is most effective later in the film, as the encampments spread to other universities. Suddenly, there are interviews with more people, and the story goes from New York to California to Georgia and many other campuses.
Through it all, Workman and his co-editor Mahdokht Mahmoudabadi keep it all flowing smoothly, never losing the narrative thread. The music, which is not original to the film, only comes in at a handful of pivotal moments, adding to the tension but also freeing the rest of the film of didactically guiding the audience's emotions. There is no continuous score hammering the emotional highs. Rather, shorter musical pieces are used only when absolutely needed, giving the film a stark, gritty, cinéma vérité style.
At only 80 minutes, 'The Encampments' tells a fascinating, ripped-from-the-headlines story. Its brevity is apt, since the incomplete story is still unfolding, and nobody knows where or how it ends. However, as a snapshot of a particular few weeks in which a protest movement was born and spread, it's an effective and prescient documentary. Eerily, in one of the last shots in which Khalil is shown, he's asked by an off-camera voice, 'What would happen to you if you were deported?' to which he responds, 'I will live.'
'The Encampments' shows that same determination and confidence from other young people who carry the responsibility of attempting change.
Best of Variety
The Best Albums of the Decade