In March, The Encampments, a documentary on the pro-Palestinian protest movement on US college campuses, opened at the Angelika Film Center in New York. The nonfiction theatrical marketplace has never been breezy in the US, but this is a particularly difficult time for documentaries, let alone films about hot-button issues considered politically sensitive or, under the new administration, outright dangerous; one of the Encampments’ primary subjects, the Columbia University student-activist Mahmoud Khalil, remains in detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) without charge for any crime. Large-scale distributors, including all of the major streaming services, are increasingly wary of anything deemed controversial, leaving such films as Union, on the Amazon Labor Union, or the Oscar-winning Palestinian-Israeli documentary No Other Land without distribution in the US.
Nevertheless, over an exclusive first-weekend run, The Encampments made $80,000 at the Angelika – the highest per-screen average for a documentary since the Oscar-winning Free Solo in 2018. That number may sound like peanuts compared with, say, the multimillion theatrical haul of a Marvel movie, but it’s a significant win for the specialty box office – and validation for a film whose mere existence, as a pro-Palestinian narrative, led to threats of violence at the Angelika, an incident of vandalism in the theater’s lobby and social media censorship of its ads.
