“Part of a Peace Movement”: ‘The Encampments’ Co-Director Kei Pritsker on Correcting the Historical Record and Breaking a Box Office Record

Over the past year, a great deal of media discourse centered on the many U.S. college campus demonstrations protesting Israel’s ongoing assault on Palestine. The Encampments opens with a montage of derisive comments on the series of student encampments that cohered last spring, such as Senator Tom Cotton calling them “Little Gazas” and New York City Mayor Eric Adams calling the national phenomenon “a movement to radicalize young people.” With The Encampments, directors Kei Pritsker and Michael Workman forge a counter-narrative to the mainstream media. Embedded with the encampment at Columbia University, which became a particular focal point in this controversy, they let the students speak for themselves.

One of the film’s protagonists, organizer Mahmoud Khalil, was arrested by ICE in March (not long before the documentary’s world premiere at CPH:DOX) as part of the Trump administration’s “Catch and Revoke” program targeting supposed “pro-Hamas” international students. As of the time of writing, he remains in custody in an ICE detention center in Louisiana. This and similar arrests and student expulsions spurred the film’s makers and its distributor Watermelon Pictures to begin its theatrical release earlier than planned. Despite the rush, The Encampments pulled in the largest single-theater opening ever for a documentary (it was also the second-highest opening PTA) before expanding to over 50 markets last weekend. Amid the film’s early theatrical success, we sat down with Pritsker over Zoom to discuss the making of the film, its context in current political events, and adjusting the distribution timetable. This interview has been edited and condensed for time and clarity.

DOCUMENTARY: What’s it been like seeing the movie’s reception and positive box office take?

KEI PRITSKER: I think it reflects how the documentary tells the truth about the encampments, which I don’t think could be coming at a better time. It just so happened that we had a finished film about the encampment movement, which is now essentially serving as the justification for the Trump administration’s deportation campaign. When you think about what they’re saying about these students who are being arrested and threatened with deportation, their wrongdoing—since many of them have not been charged with any crime—is that they participated in the encampment movement, which the administration is trying to say was violent or antisemitic. I think the positive reception is because this film so thoroughly debunks everything that’s been said about people like Mahmoud or any of the students who participated in protests for Palestine.

D: I understand that you bumped up your theatrical timetable because of Mahmoud’s arrest.

KP: Yes. The film was largely done, we had a cut that we felt good about. We were still considering some questions, like potentially switching around the timeline. By the time we were submitting to festivals, there hadn’t been any huge developments for a while. The encampments had passed, so it felt like the end of the story. 

But our primary goal was to correct the narrative about the encampments, and when Mahmoud was arrested, doing that became even more urgent; it was correcting the historical record. Five years from now, when people read about the encampments, they can watch our film and see what actually happened. Lies about the encampments are being used to justify a deportation campaign, and we were sitting on a film that tells the students’ side in their own words, showing that they weren’t motivated by antisemitic hatred or inflicting violence, that they were part of a peace movement and wanted to stop a genocide in Palestine. 

We felt a responsibility to put it out after Mahmoud was arrested. The decision we made in probably a few days, and there wasn’t a lot of disagreement about it. Our distributor, Watermelon Pictures, is largely responsible for the incredible theatrical run we’ve done. They’re the ones who made this possible; huge shout out to them for helping this film get as far as it has. One thing we did add was a small scene where Mahmoud is asked at a press conference what he would do if he was deported. He says, “I will live, Palestine will live, and I’ll continue to fight.” 

D: You were with the Columbia protestors from Day 1 of their encampment. What led you to being embedded with them?

KP: The film lives at Columbia largely for practical reasons. I work for BreakThrough News, and I was there initially as a reporter. BreakThrough doesn’t really have the money to have multiple people in the field shooting with cameras, so I was the only reporter covering this for them. And I happened to be at Columbia as it became a national story. If I had left the encampment, I would’ve had big issues getting back in, so I stationed myself there to be able to capture it.

We don’t want people to think Columbia is exceptional. It wasn’t even the first encampment; there were encampments at Vanderbilt and Stanford before it. But it became the center point because that was the first encampment that was repressed by the school’s administration. Columbia was the first school to arrest its own students, and imagery of that set off the global encampment movement. But it’s largely our focus because that was the only campus we had footage from. We also incorporated UCLA because someone who supports our work had a bunch of footage from there and gave it to us. We also wanted to highlight the brutal pro-Israel mob that descended on UCLA’s campus, which was completely ignored by the media while Columbia students were accused of violence. I still haven’t seen a single video of anyone in the Columbia encampment hurting anyone or saying anything antisemitic, while there are countless videos of this lynch mob—that’s really the only way to describe it—ripping students out of the UCLA encampment, beating protestors bloody, and shooting fireworks at them, which very well could have killed someone. 

But we don’t think that any single university played a more important role. The point of the film is that any campus that stood up for Palestine was brutally repressed, they were seen as a threat to the establishment. People were expelled, suspended, faced tear gas, all these different things.

D: How many people did you tend to have in the field?

KP: Everything in the encampment, I shot all that myself, and I didn’t have anyone else there with me. Again, BreakThrough has a shoestring budget. I wasn’t even thinking about a documentary when I was there, I was just shooting to make a news package. Afterwards, when we looked at the footage and realized we had something of historic significance, we brought together a core team of three people: myself, my co-director Michael Workman, and our lead producer Matt Belen, who’s a colleague of mine at BreakThrough.

D: Did any of you ever run into trouble with police or pro-Israel protestors?

KP: Not really. I would say the pro-Israel protestors were cognizant of being filmed. They would yell things and try to get a rise out of people, and they’d come at night and play music really loudly when people were trying to sleep. But they never targeted me. The police, aside from the fact that they locked down the university and basically made it impossible for journalists to get in or out. When Hind’s Hall was being raided, they cleared out the courtyard. You see some footage of me being pushed away. They cleared that area because they didn’t want us to see what they were going to do to the students.

D: Was it difficult to gain access to the protestors and organizers?

KP: They let me in because I had reported on pro-Palestine protests at Columbia in the past. The opening scene, with the protest against the banning of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, happened in November 2023. That was the first protest at Columbia I went to cover. So they already knew me. At BreakThrough, we don’t pretend to be neutral. I support Palestine, and that’s clear in my journalism. The students knew I wasn’t another media outlet trying to get some frankenbite of them for my own narrative. They knew I had been in SJP in undergrad. So they trusted me from the get-go, and I was one of the few journalists allowed to live in the encampment itself.

D: When did Macklemore come on as a producer?

KP: He came on pretty late, I want to say around February. Watermelon Pictures was in touch with him, we’d been trying to get the film in front of him for a while because we had a feeling he would enjoy it. He obviously made two songs about Hind’s Hall. When he saw a cut, he loved it and wanted to work with us right away.

D: With your release timetable changed, how have you adjusted your plans for rolling out the film? What do you have planned now?

KP: Before we moved up the release, we were planning an impact campaign. It’s still in the works. We were planning on doing screenings at campuses and independent theaters. But with the attention that has come back on the encampments, this happened very naturally and organically. People wanted to screen the film, people want to see it. I think many of the things we were planning on doing in that time between the picture lock and the release almost handled themselves because of the urgency around the subject matter. 

As far as our future plans for release, we’re continuing to do the theatrical run and we’re in 60 cities right now, and once that’s finished, we’re going to look at putting it on platforms for streaming. There are some other festivals we’re looking at. Watermelon understands this world a little better than myself; I’m primarily a journalist.

Dan Schindel is a freelance critic and full-time copy editor living in Brooklyn. He has previously worked as the associate editor for documentary at Hyperallergic.