The horror of Gaza is approached on this documentary by way of a narrative from the Joe Biden period – and it has arguably been overtaken by events. In 2024, college students at New York’s Columbia University arrange out of doors pro-Palestinian protest encampments, filling East Butler Lawn with tents; this was within the boisterous custom of the Sixties anti-Vietnam-war campus demonstrations and the Occupy Wall Street motion, demanding an finish to Columbia’s direct and oblique funding in Israel. The protests have been led by the calm and personable determine of student Mahmoud Khalil and protesters have been entitled to level out that Columbia had, in any case, divested from Russia over Ukraine.
The protests carried on and unfold to different universities within the US, and Columbia president Minouche Shafik got here underneath immense strain. The encampment escalated to the occupation of a college constructing, which gave the college authorities the pretext they wanted for sending in the NYPD, and the protest was violently, acrimoniously (however not fully) halted.
And what did it obtain? This query is, for me, the place the documentary is flawed. The protesters did not get Columbia to divest, however Shafik quit and pro-Palestinian consciousness was raised. Khalil is smilingly interviewed on the finish, stating his perception that this trigger is approaching success. But that interview was presumably filmed earlier than the brand new brutality of the Trump administration and the outrageous arrest of Khalil, who’s now held in a Louisiana jail, and was solely just lately allowed to see his infant son. Was the Trump administration reacting with typical spite and malice to the encampments? Maybe. That is now a really massive half of the story which this movie can’t accommodate, besides with some sentences over the ultimate credit. Perhaps the total story of the encampments has but to be informed.
