On March 21, the same day Columbia University conceded to President Trump’s policy demands as a condition for restoring $400 million in federal funding, a timely screening of a new documentary dissected the 2024 student protests for Gaza at Columbia that sparked an international phenomenon. The Encampments (2025), produced by BreakThrough News and Watermelon Pictures, extricates the movement from the grips of mainstream media narratives and places it back in the hands of its organizers, including Palestinian graduate student and lead co-negotiator Mahmoud Khalil, who is currently detained and facing possible deportation.
Directed by BreakThrough News journalist Kei Pritsker and filmmaker Michael T. Workman, with rapper Macklemore and BreakThrough Editor-in-Chief Ben Becker among the film’s executive producers, the 76-minute documentary follows the Gaza Solidarity Encampments at Columbia University over the two-week period. The film specifically highlights the voices of Khalil, co-negotiator and graduate student Sueda Polat, since-expelled PhD candidate and student worker union leader Grant Miner, and university alum Naye Idriss.
“We want this documentary to be a tool to agitate, ignite, and inspire the movement and to also hopefully bring new people in,” Workman said at the screening, also noting that the film was created to “protect all of the students who are under fire right now.”
The Encampments rewinds the timeline to the organizers’ decision, on April 17, to escalate their push for the university to divest from weapons and surveillance technology manufacturers supplementing Israel’s killing and destruction in Gaza and settler expansion in the Occupied West Bank.