This March, two documentaries on the aftermath of the 7 October 2023 attacks reached theaters within days of each other. One, called October 8, focused on the “emergence of antisemitism on college campuses, on social media and on the streets” after Hamas forces killed more than 1,200 people in southern Israel, most of them civilians. The film, executive-produced by Debra Messing, was widely released by Briarcliff Entertainment, a maverick distribution studio that has also handled the Trump biopic The Apprentice and the Jamal Khashoggi documentary The Dissident; Messing promoted the film on mainstream programs such as MSNBC’s Morning Joe. It ultimately grossed more than $1.3m domestically, a high total for a political documentary.
The other film, The Encampments, faced a tougher road. A documentary on campus protests against Israel’s retaliatory destruction of Gaza, focusing in part on the activist Mahmoud Khalil – by then detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) for his activism – got no celebrity morning show promotion. Its specialty release at New York’s Angelika theater led to threats of violence, an incident of vandalism in the theater’s lobby and social media censorship of its ads. That it was released at all – and made $80,000 in its opening weekend, a significant win for the specialty box office – is due to Watermelon Pictures, an upstart, Palestinian American-led film-financing and -distribution company founded by brothers Hamza and Badie Ali to help films with Palestinian perspectives reach audiences they otherwise would not, in a market that has otherwise ignored or deprioritized them.
