A year ago this month, encampments sprouted up across college campuses and public spaces in the US and the world, calling for an end to the war on Gaza and for universities to divest from companies with economic ties to Israel. To many in the national media, the encampments appeared out of nowhere, but they were actually an escalation of months of pro-Palestine protests on campuses. Students involved in the movement reported being subject to arrests, suspensions, and expulsions. Within days of the encampments becoming a major story, many university presidents began to allow police and the National Guard on their campuses to arrest what ultimately amounted to over 3,100 people by June 2024.
While dozens of campuses saw violence and conflict, perhaps none received as much coverage as New York City’s Columbia University, where encampment arrests on April 18, 2024, helped spur the movement to spread. A year later, a new documentary from Palestinian American-run Watermelon Pictures, and Breakthrough News (with rapper Macklemore and Alana Hadid among the producers), shows perspectives from inside the encampments. Its release was moved up to this month because two of the film’s three main sources are currently being targeted for their involvement in the protests.
Mahmoud Khalil, then a grad student at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, was a lead negotiator for Columbia students during the protests, alongside grad student Sueda Polat. In March, Khalil, a permanent resident, was abducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, who claimed his green card had been revoked. Khalil is still being held in a Louisiana detention center while his lawyers try to fight his deportation.
Grant Miner, president of Student Workers of Columbia, UAW 2710, was another organizer speaking on behalf of the students, and in the film is shown sharing his experience as a Jewish student. Miner was expelled from Columbia over his involvement in the 2024 protest occupation of a campus building shortly after Khalil’s detention, and the day before contract bargaining was set to begin between the union and the university. “Functionally, I was expelled for speaking out against genocide,” Miner told Democracy Now! in an interview about the film.
Of course, this backlash goes far beyond Columbia — multiple Ivies have had federal funding threatened or slashed by the Trump administration, which federal officials claim is being withheld because of the schools’ failure to combat antisemitism.
Teen Vogue speaks to co-director Kei Pritsker and student organizer Sueda Polat about the film, its intentions, and telling the story of the encampments during an era of state repression. “We felt the need to make this film [because] the media was ignoring the fundamental thing that was motivating the students, which was Gaza and which was the genocide,” says Pritsker.
This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Kei Pritsker: [Mahmoud’s arrest] triggered the decision, and it was a pretty straightforward decision after that. We saw what happened to him, all the lies that the Trump administration was telling about Mahmoud. We [were] sitting on a trove of footage of Mahmoud countering everything that Trump is saying — not just footage of Mahmoud, but footage of the encampment, of Jews at the encampment; footage proving the true motivations of the encampment, [its] leaders talking about why the encampment started, that it wasn't motivated by this random hatred of Jews or antisemitism, but that it was always tied to what this protest movement was always about, which is Gaza and the genocide.
We were like, “Wow, we're sitting on a movie that is basically done, locked and loaded, ready to go, that debunks everything that Trump is saying. We have to put this out as soon as possible….” Our goal was always to maximize the political impact, to make a big political intervention, to show that the encampments weren't what the media said they were, weren't what the Biden administration said they were. So when Trump decided to bring everyone back into this, to use the lies about the encampments as the basis for this deportation campaign, we knew there was really no more important moment to release this film than now.
KP: The students didn't just wake up one day and say, “We want to cause maximum chaos. We want to do something so crazy, and we don't want to go to class anymore.” The students had been protesting for months and months and months after October 7, but also way before that, and we talk about that a little bit in the film.
There had been literally years of precedent of student protest, nonviolent peaceful disruption, civil disobedience, people passing divestment resolutions, going through the university's own democratic process to say, “Hey, we don't want our tuition money, our endowment invested [in] companies that make money off of selling weapons that kill people — crazy.” And the university ignored them at every step, which is why they felt the need to do something dramatic, like set up an encampment on the lawn.
We're trying to tell the perspectives of the students, which, funny enough, is the perspective that [almost] none of the mainstream media would tell. They would only tell the perspective of the universities, of Congress, of the Israel lobby, of the military industrial complex. So we're like, “Okay, maybe the students also should have a say in this. Maybe someone needs to tell their side of the story and balance out the playing field.” We see the role this documentary plays as something that levels a very skewed media landscape, maybe back a little bit in the favor of the students.
Sueda Polat: The most important thing for me — and the reason that I'm reluctant to do a lot of interviews or to answer a lot of questions about this movie — is because I feel like, particularly in the US, outlets focus on the media spectacle of what the encampments were; a moment of renewed protest movements in the United States, student activism. I get that all these things are really attractive, and people want to know what that was like. But truly, for every single student, at the heart of every protest and every demonstration, it was always Gaza.
Even today, as we continue to struggle against genocide, as we continue to struggle against the university, we understand that we're complicit in that genocide. So the expulsions, the suspensions, the repression, or even the media attention, none of it matters if Gaza doesn't matter — if Gaza doesn't make it to part of the story.
KP: [A lot of] the [mainstream] media was trying to say, they’re doing this because they hate Jews. They’re doing this because they’re woke white kids. They’re doing this because they’re just bored or troubled. They wanna virtue-signal. The purpose of this film was to remind people the thing that catalyzed all of this was always Gaza. What is so shocking about that? Why are people shocked by the idea that students would be disgusted by a genocide, just like everyone else in society? The willful ignoring of what the students have been saying, of “We are protesting a genocide,” is huge.
KP: The main reason for not including Trump or the election is that we don't really feel that issues of foreign policy, especially Palestine, really change between the two parties. Yes, it's Trump that has inaugurated this new regime of making protesting for Palestine [and] talking about the human rights abuses and the war crimes in Palestine basically illegal… [but] it was Biden who oversaw months and months and months of the genocide. We didn't want this narrative to get stuck in, like, who's the better president on Palestine? Because for decades and decades and decades, the policy between the two parties has been nearly identical. Ironically, it's a very American way to look at it. People in the US, every four years, all of a sudden everyone becomes a super political person, and they're like, “Oh my God, this is the election of our lifetime.”
KP: Because we've been getting this question a lot, I think it's important to note that a lot of people are eager for this to come out. A lot of them are excited for this to come out. They're not afraid, because they feel a sense of responsibility now to not hide, to say with their face forward that they still stand by the encampment. They stand by everything they did. They stand by Mahmoud. They stand by Palestine.
Some people told us that they feel like they have a duty to go forward with this because of what happened to Mahmoud, that this film and that speaking out in favor of the encampments helps his case, and that therefore they have a responsibility to help put out anything that shows that this encampment was not about hatred, it was not about violence, it was not about any of that.
SP: We know that [Columbia is] increasing surveillance, increasing what are literally checkpoints on campus. We don't care about these things because they’re happening to us, but we care about them in the fact that it shows an increasing degree of repression for the sake of curtailing protest and activism.
[Israel] broke a ceasefire that was internationally guaranteed. They're pushing people from the south up north, they're pushing the north down south, so that they can be in the middle.
Our lives, our loves, our aspirations, our hopes, our dreams: none of these things are more important than a child in Gaza, than a man in Gaza, than a woman in Gaza. If we give in to the repression here, if we abide by the chilling effect, then we're not doing anything more than what the state, empire, what the university as an arm of the state, wants from us anyway. And the right thing to do, the brave thing to do, and the just thing to do is to continue, despite the risks that might accrue for the people here.
SP: I don't think documentaries tend to be very ethical as a whole, but I think this documentary was as ethical as it possibly could have been, with footage from Gaza interspersed between ours. It really felt like we were bolstering the story, as opposed to just telling a story about a student movement.
KP: We would never think about making a film about Palestine without including Palestine. This movie isn't about student activism. It's not about universities complicit in war crimes. It's about what has been happening to the Palestinian people, first and foremost, and then how that is bolstered and supported by universities, by Congress, by politicians.
SP: I feel utter heartbreak, and I feel an immense sense of responsibility. I really, really strongly believe that all of humanity is tethered together, and if we haven't lost our humanity, we feel that in our hearts, we feel a genuine connection to every other human being in the world.
I know that it's merely historical accident that separates me from people in Gaza or people elsewhere in the world. I'm an immigrant to America; it's merely the waves of urbanization and immigration that pushed me into this particular plot of land, and I could not have been here. I could have been born elsewhere, migrated elsewhere.
What that means to me is that it's not a hobby or a passion, but it's my and everybody else's responsibility — deepest, deepest responsibility and burden that should be on everybody's shoulders — to stop the genocide, because that's our brothers and sisters. That's our family. That's our human family, that's our people — more than any of these corporations, more than any of these politicians, more than this nation, these United States. So I feel a responsibility, and I feel like, collectively, we're failing in that responsibility. And I feel ashamed.
