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The horror of Gaza is approached in this documentary via a story from the Joe Biden era – and it has arguably been overtaken by events. In 2024, students at New York’s Columbia University set up outdoor pro-Palestinian protest encampments, filling East Butler Lawn with tents; this was in the boisterous tradition of the 1960s anti-Vietnam-war campus demonstrations and the Occupy Wall Street movement, demanding an end to Columbia’s direct and indirect investment in Israel. The protests were led by the calm and personable figure of student Mahmoud Khalil and protesters were entitled to point out that Columbia had, after all, divested from Russia over Ukraine.
The protests carried on and spread to other universities in the US, and Columbia president Minouche Shafik came under immense pressure. The encampment escalated to the occupation of a university building, which gave the university authorities the pretext they needed for sending in the NYPD, and the protest was violently, acrimoniously (but not completely) halted.
And what did it achieve? This question is, for me, where the documentary is flawed. The protesters failed to get Columbia to divest, but Shafik quit and pro-Palestinian consciousness was raised. Khalil is smilingly interviewed at the end, stating his belief that this cause is approaching success. But that interview was presumably filmed before the new brutality of the Trump administration and the outrageous arrest of Khalil, who is now held in a Louisiana jail, and was only recently allowed to see his infant son. Was the Trump administration reacting with typical spite and malice to the encampments? Maybe. That is now a very big part of the story which this film can’t accommodate, except with some sentences over the final credits. Perhaps the full story of the encampments has yet to be told.
