REVIEW: The Encampments [2025]

Rating: NR | Runtime: 81 minutes
Release Date: March 28th, 2025 (USA)
Studio: Watermelon Pictures
Director(s): Kei Pritsker & Michael T Workman

Disclose, divest, we will not stop, we will not rest!

While some might use Mahmoud Khalil’s participation in Kei Pritsker and Michael T Workman’s documentary The Encampments as a means to simply vilify Donald Trump and his MAGA administration for their unlawful detention and potential deportation of the Columbia University graduate student (thankfully reversed 104 days later), the events depicted in the film all happened on Joe Biden’s watch. The events that specifically revolve around Columbia’s campus all happened under democratic mayor Eric Adams’ watch. If you still believed America operates as a two-party system, hopefully this will open your eyes.

Focusing mainly on Columbia considering it was the first site of Palestinian encampments and ultimately the first instance of city police being used to forcibly arrest protestors (with a few asides at the University of California and many video clips of some three hundred other campuses around the world that joined the movement), we are provided an on-the-ground look at the hypocrisy of what went on removed from the agenda-fueled filters of mainstream media on both sides of the aisle (it was surely an intentional move to ensure there were as many or more clips from CNN and MSNBC as Fox News) via testimonials from Khalil, Sueda Polat, Grant Miner, and Naye Idriss.

We hear about the closed-door negotiations with campus officials and the strong-arm attempts to trick students into signing away their rights to protest for empty promises their own language confirmed would never be binding. We watch numerous examples of Zionists spewing hateful rhetoric (“I hope they rape you.”) towards protestors, leading us to wonder why so much footage of their hate exists and yet the world simply takes their word that more occurs on the other side without any proof. And we learn from an administrative whistleblower that the so-called “antisemitism” numbers being reported are mostly compiled from pro-Israelis’ saying that hearing the word “Palestine” and being in the physical presence of Palestinians in class are themselves antisemitic acts.

That last one is crucial to this subject and why everything happening today under Trump’s Christofascist regime is so scary. The problem with ethnostates like Israel is that genocidal leaders like Benjamin Netanyahu can blur the line between government and religion. They can weaponize the Zionist notion of a “Jewish state” as one that renders it so any anti-Zionist rhetoric must simultaneously also be considered antisemitic. It’s an intentional conflation meant to house their violent actions inside a manufactured gray area for those who believe a persecuted people cannot themselves be persecutors. So, we line-up behind Ukraine when Russia invades for a land grab (with Columbia quickly divesting their Russian interests), but cheer on Israel once they do the same.

Trump and company love this contrast. They’ve been steadily working to mimic it ever since 2016 through a constant stream of xenophobic bile. “All Mexicans are rapists.” “All Muslims are terrorists.” Where they sought to ban countries from immigrating to America during his first term, they now seek to remove those who are already here regardless of their citizenship or immigration status. They have equated brown skin to “criminal” in such a way that republicans still favor the on-going ICE kidnappings despite 70% of those taken having no criminal record. It doesn’t matter that the government threw the first stone. Any attempt to fight back becomes terrorism. The October 7th tragedy gave Israel a shield to act with impunity. Trump acts with impunity in hopes of inciting a shield of his own.

It’s why the most damning piece within The Encampments comes from that whistleblower. The film does a great job of historically contextualizing the protests (drawing all the parallels to Vietnam that the organizers intentionally drew when escalating their plans) and the mix of live footage and interviews eloquently explains the motivations of this multi-racial and multi-religious (Zionists love to call Jewish people antisemites these days) community, but the look inside the conscious attempt to dehumanize Palestinians by Columbia itself makes the project invaluable. Delete all reference to “Palestine,” but keep “Hamas” in. Listen to complaints from white students, but ignore everyone else. Do whatever you can to protect the money.

These truths must be called out. So much so that Watermelon Pictures rushed to get the film out in theaters just three days after its festival premiere and online as a flagship title for the studio’s streaming platform debut a month later. Khalil was incarcerated without being charged with a crime and Miner was expelled just weeks beforehand. Giving them a voice was therefore crucial at a time when the establishment sought to silence them. Not that those two men, or anyone else involved, did this for themselves. No, they did it for the Palestinian people. And despite the battle still raging across the United States today without divestment, the number of people waking to the truth because of these actions has increased. The struggle for empathy over greed continues.