This fine documentary on the Palestine solidarity encampments at Columbia University, in Manhattan, makes much of comparisons with student protests against the Vietnam War in the late 1960s. We are reminded that the mainstream United States was not then much impressed with the students’ actions. (A significant majority of those polled blamed the students themselves for the National Guard’s killing of protesters at Kent State.) Over time, however, sympathy eventually drifted the way of the anti-war movement.
“Why do you think these encampments caused such an intense response from some of the most powerful people in the world?” the current film begins. We cut to Mike Johnson, speaker of the US House of Representatives, decrying “radical, extreme ideologies”. Senator Tom Cotton then argues that “these little Gazas are disgusting cesspools of anti-Semitic hate”.
It all feels startlingly familiar – right down to the use of “freaks”, a very 1960s word, to describe the protesters. Sueda Polat, a graduate student at the heart of the movement, calmly notes widespread reluctance in the US media to engage with the continuing slaughter in Palestine. Yelling at students is a heck of a lot easier.
Nobody would mistake The Encampments for an unaligned documentary. Kei Pritsker and Michael T Workman, reporting from the heart of the protest, structure their film around three key participants. Mahmoud Khalil, who acted as liaison between students and the university, later found himself arrested by the US immigration agency. Grant Miner, involved in the occupation of the college’s Hamilton Hall, was subsequently expelled from Columbia. Along with Polat, those two, addressing the camera directly, provide a sober and reasoned defence for a campaign that, among other things, asked the Ivy League institution to divest from companies with ties to the Israeli government.
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Counterarguments are sparse, mostly represented by spittle-flecked politicians and fulminating right-wing media. Fair enough. There is an honourable tradition of film-makers anchoring themselves to one core perspective – and, as the opening of the film clarifies, contradictory takes are available all day and every day. The Encampments may win over few hostile to the college occupations, but it offers an important record of how the campaign developed.
Pritsker and Workman lay out the story in taut, disciplined fashion. There is no flash to the documentary – no animation, no re-enactments, no show-off montages. We learn about the demands for divestment. We hear how, after requests are ignored, students set up camps on the lawns. What seems to have set the Columbia occupation apart was the authorities’ decision to allow the police in to arrest students. The directors get their camera in among the rough and tumble.
The key difference between documentaries on the 1960s protests and those today is, of course, to do with technology. The students are wired in to one another and to the wider worlds with social media. The directors have equipment that can go anywhere (and that never runs out of film).
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Pritsker and Workman are able to inveigle an extraordinary amount of information into an economic running time. We get close into the students’ faces. We learn how they fed themselves. We get a sense of the movement spreading out to the rest of the United States and the rest of the world. It’s a raw, bald film, but one that never loses its focus.
What the world ultimately comes to think of the protests and of this film depends on events in the Middle East. But the cases of Miner and Khalil confirm that those behind the barricades had – and still have – much at stake. This is no game. “We are just getting started,” one protester says towards the close. “We have a cause we believe in and we are going to fight until the end.”
In cinemas from Friday, June 6th
