The Encampments

On 8 March 2025, immigration agents in New York detained Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia graduate student and a spokesman for the campus pro-Palestinian protests. Khalil is one of the voices in 'The Encampments', the documentary Kei Pritsker and Michael T. Workman had spent months cutting, and his arrest brought the release forward. It opened in American cinemas twenty days later.

The film goes back to 17 April 2024, when a group of students pitched the first tents on the university lawn. In the end there were a hundred and twenty. They asked Columbia to stop investing part of its endowment, close to 14 billion dollars, in companies tied to the Israeli military. Pritsker moved in with a camera, and Khalil, Sueda Polat and Grant Miner describe how the assemblies and the talks with the administration went.

The edit braids three kinds of footage: what the camp actually looked like, guitars, cleaning rotas and a Passover Seder among the tents; what was being said about it on television, from Fox News to MSNBC; and the images of Gaza the students were projecting. To that it adds archive from 1968, when an earlier Columbia generation occupied Hamilton Hall against the Vietnam War, the same building their successors took in 2024 and renamed Hind Hall.

Others who appear include the Gazan journalist Bisan Owda, the editor Ali Abunimah, the professor and former Black Panther Jamal Joseph, and Rabbi Abby Stein. The rapper Macklemore is among the executive producers and the distributor is Watermelon Pictures, a Palestinian-founded company. The last stretch has the police clearing the campus, the counter-protester attacks at UCLA and a postscript on Miner's expulsion with twenty-two other students. Donald Trump's administration turns up in that final stretch.

It premiered at CPH:DOX in Copenhagen, where the human rights jury gave it a special mention, and opened at a single New York cinema, the Angelika, with sold-out screenings and some 76,000 dollars across three days, which its distributor calls the best single-screen opening for a documentary. The American run finished above half a million. British cinemas got it in June 2025 with a 15 certificate, and it never opened in Spain or Mexico. It runs 80 minutes, reached screens weeks after 'No Other Land' won the documentary Oscar, and reviews were largely favourable, though some critics felt the harmony inside the camp looked a little too tidy.

• Documentary