Can documentaries about Israel and documentaries about Palestine peacefully co-exist? Two new films, October 8 and The Encampments, tackle angles of the same story. However, both docs seem divorced from the world in which the other exists.
The films join the dizzying flood of documentaries in the wake of the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023, which precipitated Israel to respond with wrathful violence on Palestine. An upcoming article in POV’s Spring/Summer issue surveys the field of these documentaries, including No Other Land, Lyd, and Israelism, so I’ll refrain from scooping my colleague’s work, but these two documentaries now playing in theatres aren’t covered in the article and merit consideration. Someone also suggested recently that POV was ignoring No Other Land and my head nearly exploded, so I’d hate to neglect two films that absolutely deserve discussion in a complicated field. But hearing that we’re downplaying a documentary tagged in over 20 articles on this website illustrates how hard it is to discuss any of these films, or any one film, these days in a way that satisfies anyone.
What makes the case of October 8 and The Encampments such a notable pair, however, is that neither film seems interested in being in conversation with the other one. October 8 deals with the rise of antisemitism following October 7, including the rhetoric and climate of university and college campus protests. Meanwhile, The Encampments observes the students at Columbia University protesting in solidarity with Palestine and advocating for the school to divest from the US and Israeli arms industry. Both docs distressingly leave one feeling that peace may be impossible—not just for the people of Palestine and Israel, but also for the increasingly polarised factions advocating for either side amid the culture wars.
Each film is rather compelling in its own right. However, watching them one after another, they’re equally troubling. These docs both omit perspectives that risk challenging their respective points of view. Engaging with only one of them yields a disservice to the many people affected by an ongoing tragedy.
October 8, directed by Wendy Sachs, features absolutely devastating perspectives from survivors of the October 7 attacks, which killed over 1200 people and saw 250 hostages abducted by Hamas, many of whom have subsequently been killed. Survivor Irit Lahav takes the camera on a tour through her home in kibbutz Nir Oz. It’s a harrowing gut-punch of an opening sequence as she tells of following the violence in her neighbourhood group chat as it unfolded. As Sachs’ camera observes the rubble and ruins of a community eerily bereft of people, Lahav painfully remembers neighbours frantically typing messages like, “They’re in my house.” “They’re here.” “They shot my husband.”
She shares the safe room—her office—where she and her daughter hid. She tells how she saved them by rigging a piece of the vacuum cleaner with other basic household tools to create a barrier. They sheltered as bullets and grenades devastated their community. Just a few kilometers from the agreement line, Nir Oz was an early stop for Hamas. Later in the film, she notes the irony that many victims of October 7 believed that peace for Israel depended upon peace for Palestine.
The film jumps stateside as October 8 features a chorus of talking heads. Actors Debra Messing and Michael Rappaport, author Sheryl Sandberg, and journalist Bari Weiss join students, activists, and people from different walks of life who share what it’s like to walk around America as a Jewish person after October 7. Simply put: it’s hell.
The first half-hour or so of October 8 provides viscerally uncomfortable viewing as the interviewees share stories of encountering hateful and violent rhetoric, in some cases experiencing antisemitism similar to that which their forced parents and grandparents to flee for America years ago. Meanwhile, interviewees note how the pain of the October 7 massacres—the largest killing of Jews since the Holocaust—was compounded by statements issued by universities, corporations, and NGOS that played the blame game with Israel but neglected to mention Hamas in their acrobatic statements that left everybody unhappy. Messing and Rappaport express their disappointment that few celebrities use their platforms to voice their support for Jews and Israel, with Rappaport noting that the fact that he headlined a rally indicates how little top talent spoke out.
The film makes some compelling arguments about the pervasiveness of antisemitism in contemporary society, but it also jackknifes into bizarre tangents that blame diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives for the rise in antisemitism. Sachs also draws many false equivalencies between October 7 and other tragedies, like the Pulse Nightclub shooting, which was executed by an ISIS devotee, not a follower of Hamas—a horrible tragedy, but not the same thing, especially since Pulse arguably inspired a swell of support for LGBTQ+ people. At the same time, Sachs proves highly selective in the information she shares about the interviewees and the biases they bring. (Sam Adams at Slate does an excellent job playing Snopes with the film.) As a film, October 8 makes some compelling points whenever it isn’t flying off the rails. Unfortunately, it spends less time on the tracks than off them.
Meanwhile, The Encampments, directed by Kei Pritsker and Michael T. Workman, takes a tighter perspective on recent events by zeroing in on a few pro-Palestinian activists at Columbia University. The film has a timely hook with Mahmoud Khalil as one of its chief protagonists. Khalil’s arrest by ICE on March 8, 2025 underscores the urgency of many points he and others make in the film about America’s complicity in genocide and the persecution of people who voice support for Palestine.
The Encampments takes the mode of a point of view activist doc. Just like October 8, it makes no excuses for its politics and it wears them proudly. The film features some riveting footage of students on the ground as they mobilize protests and stand in solidarity. Khalil and interviewees like Maya Abdallah offer clear talking points about the students’ demands and motivation. Their protests serve to expose the hypocrisy that exists when educational institutions like Columbia fund higher education by investing in warfare. The student activists hope that aligning practice and pedagogy means that the next generation of bright minds won’t have diplomas printed with blood.
Pritsker and Workman capture students rallying together in the heat of the moment. Some Jewish students speak up about how they resent that their religion and their pain serves as Israel’s excuse for the violence that’s claimed over 50,000 lives while injuring and displacing tens of thousands of Palestinians at a low estimate. (You won’t find any perspectives like that in October 8 though!) The Encampments frequently provides exhilarating viewing for lefties. It’s the kind of rousing documentary that really inspires someone to join a picket line. It also includes informative talking points about what divestment means in philosophy and practice, something that’s been somewhat absent from protests and coverage of them, so it’s a great primer when it comes to articulating what protesters from campuses to Hot Docs are actually fighting for.
While the leaner Encampments has fewer points of obvious criticism than October 8, if in part because it stays in its lane while the latter veers into all sorts of tangents, it’s actually quite jarring to recognize the omission of key talking points from Sachs’ film. The Encampments acknowledges Jewish pain and claims of antisemitism on campuses only to debunk them as a self-generated. There’s no substantial discussion of Hamas and the murders, rapes, and other violence of October 7. And anyone wondering whether all the students understand the meaning behind the slogans they chant and the signs they wield might have a laugh with some of the translations provided in October 8.
In perhaps October 8‘s most compelling stateside thread, University of California student Tessa Veksler shares how she barely survived a vote to be removed from her position as Student Government President due to her pro-Israel politics, something she was open about prior to her election. Pro-Israel protesters The Encampments mostly appear as boorish hooligans displaying the absolute worst kind of racist behaviour. Interviewees label counter-protesters as “Zionists” like a kind of slur, just as talking heads in October 8 use “pro-Palestinian” and “pro-Hamas” interchangeably, as if anyone expressing solidarity for innocent people enduring ongoing violence inherently supports terrorism. (Its marketing material, with “Globalize the Intifada” written in blood on the Statue of Liberty, also reflects the film’s own problematic stereotyping in the wake of October 7.)
Both films see campuses as hotspots for freedom of speech, but only for people saying one thing. Meanwhile, their portrayals of the Congressional hearings on antisemitism on campuses yield very different perspectives, although the only point on which the docs agree is that the university presidents bellyflopped. Alternatively, The Encampments uses the campus setting to have some “bigger picture” conversations. Inadvertently, The Encampments anticipates a question posed in October 8 about weighing one group’s pain against that of another. It engages with what decolonization means, why that process is inherently radical, and why students, protesters, and activists might target Israel specifically as a force that displaced Palestinians. October 8, meanwhile, could just as easily leave a viewer thinking that Hamas took up arms over the price of eggs.
Where it gets really tricky is that most interviewees in October 8 are proudly Zionist. And the film explains in layman’s terms why many Jews feel such a deep connection to Israel and why the identification of a specific place harbours meaning in relation to one’s religion and identity. However, October 8 also doesn’t seem to recognize why folks in Palestine and their sympathizers might be angry at Israel and that many Jews aren’t Zionists. The word “Nakba” doesn’t arise, there’s no talk of a history of displacement and the horror of living under military occupation, nor do the talking heads articulate the catastrophic loss of Palestinian lives by Israel’s might post-October 7. The rift between the realities of these two films proves frustrating, to say the least, and risks gross rationalization.
There’s an odd war at the box office with documentaries in the wake of these films, too. As The Hollywood Reporter notes, some theatres are screening both October 8 and No Other Land, while audiences are turning out in droves with their politics informing which film they see. But the consensus remains that pretty much nobody is having a documentary double bill.
“The reality is if you’re fascinated by No Other Land you’re probably not fascinated by October 8, and vice versa,” Sachs told The Hollywood Reporter.
One can only imagine how much more effective October 8 would be if its director seemed interested in engaging the audience on the other side of the multiplex. Ditto The Encampments by extension. One element that makes No Other Land so compelling is its cross-border politics as the collective of Palestinian and Israeli filmmakers/journalists of Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Hamdan Ballal, and Rachel Szor navigate the factors of access, mobility, and security within the dynamics of their own production. (Underscored by Ballal’s arrest post-Oscar.) Inherent to the film is a willingness to put in the work in search of common ground.
Meanwhile, the documentaries’ road to the box office accentuates the divide, as distributors are reluctant to touch any perspective on the situation. While No Other Land (in)famously won the Oscar without any North American distributor behind its portrait of forcible home evictions in Palestine, October 8 drew a chorus of rejections from distributors and sales agents, as per The Hollywood Reporter. The Encampments hits theatres via Watermelon Pictures, a boutique label devoted to voices from Palestine and other marginalized groups. The film was understandably rushed into theatres to capitalize on media attention from Khalil’s arrest, but notably got rejected by Hot Docs despite some champions from its team and doesn’t have a Canadian screening scheduled until an April 25 debut in Vancouver.
Films like No Other Land and The Encampments hustle throughout the festival circuit and their release to rally press and raise awareness. Meanwhile, October 8 gets no festival run, but a theatrical push that’s essentially bulletproof by bypassing critics to focus on word of mouth from the Jewish community. October 8 eventually secured a home with Briarcliff Entertainment in the USA and Blue Fox in Canada, with the latter opening it in one of the widest releases in recent memory for a documentary here, hitting over a dozen screens without so much as a (wide) press release. (I literally run a documentary magazine, but only learned it was opening when I was leaving a screening of The Penguin Lessons at Cineplex Yonge & Eglinton last week and squeezed through a crowd checking in for an advance screening with several security guards flanking the event.)
However, the fact that October 8 gets a confident national release and No Other Land plays the DIY long game while receiving the industry’s highest honour by self-releasing, and The Encampments does a modest grassroots effort, speaks volumes about the politics at play in the industry. These films make arguments that are playing out in a business that doesn’t seem interested in, or capable of, reconciling an increasingly polarised conversation.
The real point, however, goes back to Sachs’ rather distressing comment. October 8 and The Encampments share an affinity for point of view filmmaking, but both films unabashedly preach to the choir. They serve as comfort viewing that seeks to affirm a perspective one already has. However, documentaries should challenge viewpoints and not simply provide confirmation and reassurance. A film doesn’t have to flip one’s politics, but it should at least inform them and inspire self-reflection, rather than ignoring competing perspectives as a matter of convenience. But without engaging with context, information, and viewpoints outside their mission statements, some of these films invite a documentary no man’s land. That space looks to be widening. (For further viewing films that offer more nuanced and wide-ranging portraits include Coexistence, My Ass! and Beethoven’s Nine.)
Anyone who sees No Other Land, October 8, or The Encampments should want to see the other films too. By all means criticize them, be uncomfortable with their politics, and ask questions before, during, and after the screening, but at least see them. Pretending that other lives, experiences, and viewpoints don’t exist outside one’s own is how we got ourselves into the mess in the first place.
