At 11 a.m. on Saturday, the Ron Robinson Theater will screen the 2025 documentary, The Encampments. The movie centers on the fledgling student anti-war movement that protested Israel’s horrific war on Gaza and spread throughout the American higher education system last spring. In order to protest their institutions’ financial interests in and institutional ties to Israel, students set up encampments on over a dozen campuses.
The media and politicians on both sides of the spectrum disparaged these encampments, despite the fact that they were similar to the student-led anti-war movement of the 1960s and the anti-apartheid BDS movement of the 1980s, which forced many universities to distance themselves from South Africa. The Trump administration may have found it simpler to exploit the student movement as a political wedge to impose demands and seize control of colleges on the pretext of anti-Semitism as a result of these bipartisan attacks.
Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia graduate student who was infamously detained by ICE for more than three months due to his student activism earlier this year, is featured in the film, which is centered on the student encampments at Columbia University.
Few depictions of these young activists have been fair, despite the fact that the film, which was directed by Michael T. Workman and Kei Pritsker, does not claim to be objective. Instead, it is obviously sympathetic to the students’ political and moral cause. It may be worthwhile to speak with the students themselves, considering how much the encampments have been used as a political lightning rod.
The screening is free and open to the public.
It’s dragon-slaying time!
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