Watermelon Pictures
A pro-Palestine protester speaks into a bullhorn, as captured in 'The Encampments.'
As Israel persists in its nearly-two-year bombardment of Gaza with U.S. support, resistance to the genocide continues to compel filmmakers and storytellers. One of these is Michael T. Workman, a director, cinematographer, and community organizer living in San Francisco. He and Kei Pritsker co-directed The Encampments, an eighty-two-minute documentary about the 2024 Gaza Solidarity Encampment at Columbia University and the nationwide pro-Palestine encampment movement it inspired. In March, the film set a box office record for the single-theater release of a documentary. Part of the film’s prominence came from its featuring of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian American and Columbia student leader who was illegally detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
In July, I attended a screening of The Encampments and a talk-back with Workman, sponsored by Montana for Palestine, at the Myrna Loy Theater in Helena, Montana. During the conversation, Workman repeatedly returned to the subject of storytelling. He described how power flows from the decision to tell true stories and how this power increases when public and private authorities try to censor truth-telling—including efforts to prevent the screening of films that center Palestinian stories. The crackdown on campus protests, Workman argued, elevated a timeless story about the value of all human life that is vital to ending Israel’s U.S.-backed genocide in Gaza and the broader ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people.
On September 3, I interviewed Workman for The Progressive. Over the course of our conversation, we discussed The Encampments and examined why influential politicians and mainstream media outlets were determined to reframe anti-war protests at Columbia and hundreds of other campuses as antisemitic. We explored the connection between students who opposed the Vietnam War nearly sixty years ago and students who oppose the genocide in Gaza today. We also considered a fundamental challenge for all social movements: how to make those who are not suffering feel empathy for those who are.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Like all people, you have limited time. Why did you choose this project?
Michael T. Workman: When October 7 happened and the genocide in Palestine escalated, my day-to-day work on other projects really shifted towards organizing for Palestine. When Kei [Pritsker] came to me with the footage he had shot at Columbia, it felt necessary to intervene in that moment to be able to challenge the dominant media narrative of the student movement and the movement for Palestine.
We were sitting on rock-solid evidence that this movement was anything but antisemitic or hateful, that it was a movement built on solidarity and love. We knew that we needed to put all our resources into making this film as soon as possible.
Q: What story were you trying to tell?
Workman: I think the story that we were trying to tell was, at its core, the bravery of student movements historically and in this moment, and to show how student movements are always demonized in the press. It happened during the Vietnam War struggle. It happened during the anti-apartheid struggle. And we wanted to show that these students are on the right side of history.
We wanted to tell a story about how the media misrepresents these movements. And so that’s a central conflict in the film. The film starts out with the media narratives around the encampments, and then we follow the students on campus to see what actually happened.
We also wanted to tell a story about the bravery of the Palestinian people struggling against their oppression, against their annihilation, against their ethnic cleansing. Their steadfastness is contagious. People see that and say, “You know what, they are risking it all. I should stand up against this, what do I have to lose?” That’s something that is deeply moving to me.
Q: Don’t you think that part of the urgency among municipal leaders and university administrators to dismantle these encampments was the moral discomfort they felt because of the protests?
Workman: One of the main reasons they wanted these encampments dismantled was because students were using the rhetoric of the university against the university. Universities try to hold themselves up as these places of progressive change, but the moment when the morality of these institutions is tested, they inevitably crack down on their students. And then, in twenty-five years, they take that history and manipulate the narrative to be like, “Look at this institution of incredible radical change.”
The university uses these moments of struggle opportunistically, and that will likely happen with these recent encampments, too, and probably sooner than we think. One of the first things that happened after the New York Police Department raided Hind’s Hall was that university staff collected signs from the lawn for archival purposes.
Q: What differences exist between the way the campus protests were presented in your film and the way they were presented in mainstream news outlets?
Workman: Basically, every single mainstream media outlet was extremely eager to discredit the encampments in any way they could, but they did it in different ways. Even though CNN was occasionally doing interviews with students like Mahmoud Khalil, they would immediately start asking questions about antisemitism. They weren’t asking questions about why students were protesting. They didn't want students to talk about the genocide in Gaza. They wanted them to respond to trumped-up charges of antisemitism.
At the Columbia encampment, if anyone said anything antisemitic or bigoted in any way, they would be immediately removed, but no matter how much the students [told reporters] these things, the media would just ignore it.
Q: Why is that?
Workman: Because these are corporate-owned media outlets that uphold the interests of U.S. corporations and therefore U.S. imperialism. They have to toe the government line, the capitalist line, which says that Israel is basically an extension of the United States.
Israel is a theocratic ethno-state that isn’t democratic, a state that creates a sub-class of citizens called Palestinians who don’t have the rights that Jewish citizens have. But the United States needs an outpost for its interests in the Middle East. Joe Biden has said many times that if there wasn’t an Israel, we would have to create one. He’s been saying this since the 1980s. He said it during his presidential term, too.
The role of U.S. media like The New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, and NBC is to uphold U.S. capitalist interests globally and nationally. And when other narratives threaten that hegemony, then they will do anything they can to shut down that speech.
Q: I’m curious about another line of criticism that students at these encampments had to confront: the criticism that they were violent and disruptive.
Workman: I think it’s the same story. It’s history repeating itself. If you look back at the way the Civil Rights Movement was depicted in the 1950s and 1960s, or the way in which Reconstruction in the 1860s and 1870s was depicted in the media, there’s a maligning voice saying protesters should be respectful and civil. But if you look back at history, telling people to protest in a respectful or civil way really just means “shut up.”
When has quiet pressure ever moved the needle? When has that ever moved towards progressive change? Change happens when people get organized, when people are willing to sacrifice and put themselves on the line, when they demand change and put themselves at risk. It happens when people put themselves in the crosshairs of the state, which is what these students did, which is what the Civil Rights Movement did, which is what the labor movement has historically done. And that’s when things have changed in this country.
Q: The Encampments documents the connection between student opposition to the Vietnam War in 1968 and student opposition to the genocide in Gaza. This connection reminds us that social movements have a way of reappearing, sometimes decades after they fade away. What can we conclude from this pattern of protest?
Workman: I think we tend to see the iceberg version of social movements. The encampments were like a climactic moment for the movement when it seemed like it was very strong. Then, they were dismantled, and it seemed like the movement was weak. But in reality, the movement continues to grow in strength. Israel has never been less popular than it is now, in the United States and globally, and students have a lot to do with that.
Sometimes, when the repression is the worst, those are the times where movements are gaining the most strength. If we look back to the struggle against the Vietnam War, [the movement] wasn’t always at the level of mass civil disobedience and anti-war protests. It went through ebbs and flows, but it was always on a trajectory of people becoming more fed up with the war.
Right now, media institutions are being forced to acknowledge—very softly, and far too late—what’s actually happening in Gaza. We can get caught up in defeats, saying, “Oh, the students didn’t get universities to divest, so they lost.” But really, the students were changing consciousness, building organization, and shifting public opinion. That’s the real power. That’s even more power than if they got divestment. Nevertheless, I believe that this shift in consciousness will ultimately lead to divestment [from Israel].
Q: A fundamental problem that all social movements must address is how to make those who are not suffering feel empathy for those who are suffering. Last year, one way that protesters at Columbia University tackled this problem was by centering the story of six-year-old Hind Rajab. In your film, we hear a recording of her call to emergency services immediately after Israeli forces killed six of her family members and just before she is murdered by Israeli forces. Why did you decide to include that recording in the film?
Workman: Listening to that recording of Hind Rajab being murdered is one of the most deeply horrendous and traumatizing things to hear. Including it in the film was a way of focusing on the experience of Palestinians.
The mainstream media wants to focus on a broken window or a screaming match between different protesters. They want to focus on those things because it keeps attention away from the experiences of millions of Palestinians like Hind Rajab. At any point, their entire family could be killed in front of them, and they could be next.
The students at Columbia were listening to that recording, but people who were watching CNN didn’t hear that recording. Students were getting that recording on their phones through social media, and videos like that are a big reason why students took action.
We wanted to create a space where people could really feel that anguish, to get them in the headspace of the students because that’s the emotional truth for the students. I think the viewer needs to understand where they’re coming from. You can look at the protests from a distance and try to look at that moment objectively, but you’re not getting the whole truth because you don’t understand the “why.” You don’t understand why students did what they did. The truth is in the feeling people had that led them to take action.