“Camps” can barely open in a more timely history. The documentary, which narrates the camps in Colombia from the perspective of students, will strike the role of theaters in New York three days after the first show in CPH: DOX, then expands to Los Angeles a week later. In the period before the international show of the film, two of its heroes, both of them students at Columbia University, landed on the front pages of many newspapers: Mahmoud Khalil, who was arrested by ICE because of their protest against the war in Gaza, and Grant Miner, who was expelled by Colombia for the same reason. The film was transferred to the release of these reasons.
However, its timing is not the only reason for seeing “camps”. It is also an urgent protest movie that carries the same condemnation and the dissolution of the students who organized these demonstrations last spring. Managers Michael T Then film makers turn their lens to three students who were at the forefront of this situation. It is a classic bait and switching, designed to ignore and explain what you might have heard.
The film focuses on three student leaders. Khalil, who is of Palestinian origin, was assigned to submit the demands of his colleagues, as a negotiator for students with university directors. Miners, a Jew, were the leader of workers in the Workers Syndicate. The third is SUEDA Polat, a human rights student student, the first we see.
Through camera interviews facing the front, the three talk about the reasons for joining Colombia and why they felt that they had to protest the war in Gaza. Their words are simple, direct and clear. Their faces carry the same feelings. They clearly put their demands: they do not want the money they pay Colombia to use their education to kill innocent people in Gaza. In their demands that their university not invest in weapons companies, they remember previous generations of students who protested against the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s – a historical connection that film makers show through the use of archive shots.
“Camps” tells this story in a written and easy to digest. Students began to protest, then demanded to withdraw investments from the University Board of Trustees, which is the play that they successfully followed by other conflicts in other parts of the world. When Colombia ignored all their demands, they decided the camp at the university’s promoter. Film makers had an open access to the campus and installed themselves near the procedure inside the tents held by the students. Although the images may seem familiar to those who followed this story on social media, they take an additional resonance in this context, because we see more than just short excerpts or news companies. Take the longest scenes in the full story of what was happening in Colombia at the time, with a certificate of students who led and participated in the movement.
The masses were placed close to the chants and sound amplifiers versions, and the masses are transferred to the promoters and Colombia halls, where the cameras not only pick up the protests, but all other measures that maintained this movement and gave them longevity: the music danced by students, the food they shared, and the sidewalk they read. She behaves as a cinematic photographer, Pretser moves through the fabric of many students while working in the camps, and convinced of their faces filling the frame.
Editing is fast and intelligent, but it slows down enough when you need to allow the moving viewer in particular to play in their time without impulsion. The smooth pieces of students ’certificate and return to the camps allow the story to be listed organically. This is the most effective later in the movie, as camps are spread to other universities. Suddenly, there are interviews with more people, and the story moves from New York to California to Georgia and many other universities.
Through all of this, the worker and his editor, the participant, moving, Mahmoud Abadi, keeps everything flowing smoothly, and does not lose the narrative thread. Music, which is not original for the film, comes only in a handful of axial moments, adding to stress but also editing the rest of the audience’s feelings. There are no ongoing points that knock the emotional highlands. Instead, shorter musical pieces are used only when absolute need, giving the film a flagrant and brave style and Cinéma vérité.
In just 80 minutes, “The Sampments” tells a great story of fonts. Its briefing is appropriate, because the incomplete story is still revealing, and no one knows where or how it ends. However, as a snapshot of a few weeks in which the protest movement was born and spread, it is an effective documentary. Sincerely, in one of the last shots in which Khalil appears, a voice was asked outside the camera, “What will happen to you if you are deported?” He responds to it, “I will live.”
“Camps” shows the same design and confidence from other young people who bear the responsibility for trying to change.