The Encampments Documentary: Student Uprising at Columbia with Co-Director Kei Pritsker

Yumna Patel speaks with Kei Pritsker, journalist at BreakThrough News and co-director of The Encampments — a powerful new documentary chronicling the peaceful student-led movement for Palestine in response to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Co-directed with Michael Workman and produced by BreakThrough News and Watermelon Pictures, the film offers an embedded look at the nonviolent protest that began at Columbia University and spread to more than 100 campuses across the U.S.

In April 2024, Columbia students set up an encampment demanding the university divest from companies complicit in Israel’s assault on Gaza. Within days, riot police stormed the campus, arresting over 100 students — sparking a nationwide wave of encampments and escalating repression under then President Biden. 

The backlash was swift. Universities cracked down, police raided campuses, and media figures smeared students as radicals to deflect attention from the atrocities they were protesting against.

The film follows organizers like Mahmoud Khalil, whose arrest by ICE under President Trump’s “Catch and Revoke” crackdown prompted the filmmakers to accelerate its release.

Through months of on-the-ground footage, The Encampments captures not only the political urgency of what many are calling the student intifada, but a broader generational call to resist empire, genocide, and complicity. Students connected Palestine to climate justice, Indigenous sovereignty, and global anti-colonial movements — declaring, simply: Palestine is everywhere.

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