Interview with Gaia Caramazza, Documenting Protest at Columbia
Gaia Caramazza has seen a lot of the world. She’s a journalist and filmmaker, originally from Sicily. Before ultimately landing in New York, she lived in Tunisia, Jordan, the UK, and Austria. Her work took her to the BBC World Service and Al Jazeera English. She recently graduated from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism where she ultimately undertook a Pulitzer Center reporting fellowship.
Her experiences living across the world are foundational to her work. “I think that growing up in a country that is not the same country where your parents are from automatically, or your family's from, in general, gives you an ability to step back and be able to just expand your mind, in a way,” she says. Learning and speaking multiple languages as well as translating for those around her were foundational experiences for her in her youth.
This interplay and mingling of cultures from a young age played a large part in her decision to pursue documentary filmmaking. She humorously recounted a moment from her eight years in Amman, Jordan: “I grew up watching TV a lot. I was consuming all this American television where’d be, I don’t know, Seventh Heaven playing in the afternoons.” Although the show painted a picture of idyllic suburban American life very different from the one she was living, Caramazza appreciated just how universal film could be. “You can actually communicate with lots of different people through that medium, not necessarily having to speak the same language,” she explains.
During her time in Jordan, she would visit Italy in the summers. “I used to go back to my dad's [in Sicily] for the summer holiday. My mom raised me by herself in Amman,” she tells me. In those times, she came to appreciate the many shared cultural elements between Jordan and Sicily. But things began to change. “I was in Amman during 9/11. I remember watching 9/11 on repeat on Al Jazeera. I would go back to my dad's place in the summer and I would hear a lot of discourse around like Muslims and Arabs. The time I was growing up was a post-9/11 world,” she recalls. Caramazza was growing to be politically aware. Having lived in the Middle East for much of her life, during 9/11 and the Arab Spring, the Western narratives surrounding the Middle East did not sit easy with her. “That's one of the main reasons why I decided to be a journalist, because I saw how important grassroots journalism was during the Arab Spring,” Caramazza says.
For most of her career, Caramazza has worked as a journalist. “It just so happened that I studied journalism instead of documentary filmmaking, because it felt more broad, I wasn't specializing. I could do more things with journalism.” After stints at Al Jazeera English and the BBC World Service, she decided to move to the United States and pursue documentary filmmaking. “I feel like I've done a lot of cool, interesting projects. But film is still my passion. And I still want to do that. So, when I came to the United States to study documentary filmmaking, I really got to know a lot of filmmakers in the city. I started to learn more about the filmmaking world.”
For Caramazza, the appeal of documentary filmmaking is the crossover between journalism and film. “I think, if you do it well, using journalism to ground your stories and film can elevate the beauty of your work and the emotional impact that your work can have. I think it's a winning combination that can really translate your vision and can really platform voices in a way that provokes empathy and care,” she effuses.
She couldn’t have expected what these past few years would bring. During her time at Columbia University as a graduate student, the events of October 7th took place, and soon, the world would watch a campaign of starvation and genocide take place. October 7th demarcated a new era of student activism, across the world, but especially at Columbia. On April 17th, 2024, student protestors at Columbia began an encampment to protest Columbia’s investments in Palestinian occupation. Soon after, students at hundreds of universities across the world began their own encampments, demanding their universities divest. Columbia was where it all started, and as the encampments and protests gained momentum, all eyes were on Columbia.
Caramazza was there to witness all of it. Having worked as a Middle East reporter for years, she started her graduate studies intending to focus on a different subject matter to challenge herself and think outside of her usual box. But seeing things unfold changed her mind. “As a journalist, I knew immediately that there was something there. I was hearing about students getting doxxed for protesting, their parents losing job opportunities because their children were doxxed. Students losing internship opportunities, acceptances to grad school. As someone who's not American, that was really shocking to me. I had never heard of that happening anywhere else. So I knew that this was a story,” she described.
As part of her one-year graduate program, Caramazza had to start thinking about a thesis film pretty early on. She knew that she wanted to report on and film the student movement. “I still remember standing up in front of my class and pitching the story. And everyone was silent. No one knew. I scared everyone by bringing the story into the classroom. We’re at a journalism school. We’re making documentaries. This is happening in our backyard. Why is the energy so fearful?”
It was her first film, and on a subject many deemed controversial… support was hard to come by: from peers and from faculty. Consequently, Caramazza considered other ideas, including making a documentary about pollution in the South Bronx. But she kept coming back to the idea of a film about the student protest movement. By February, Caramazza decided to go in and make the film: it’s where her heart was. In April, the encampment started. “Suddenly everyone was very supportive of us making this film, because it was international news.”
Making the sort of film she wanted to make took time and care, especially building trust with the community. “The students had gone through so much trauma because of the [alleged] doxxing and the harassment that they faced from the university, from counter-protesters, from their own families…They've really put so much on the line. I think it was really a long-term exercise. I feel I'm still earning trust,” she says.
She recalls the encampment from the very beginning. It was quiet, students walked to and from class. Reporters were there, but the atmosphere was much calmer than the fever pitch it would reach in the following weeks. Even still, they stayed up during the night, taking shifts. They wondered what would happen. In a matter of hours, the NYPD came and arrested student protestors. “We witnessed in broad daylight the arrest of a couple dozen students who were on the lawn. And then we went to jail support after that. I'm telling you all of this sequential detail, because I'm trying to explain the fact that we were there for all of it. The next two weeks, I slept two hours every night, if not, no sleeping at all. We were worried that the National Guard was going to come at any moment,” Caramazza recalls.
The experience was completely new to Caramazza and her crew. The atmosphere was tense and uncertain, but there were worries on how to navigate the situation safely. “We have no conflict reporting training,” she says. “There were a couple professors who were our mentors during that time who were giving us goggles, in case there was tear gas, or wipes to clean your eyes.” The experience fostered a small, tight-knit community of reporters. “We created this group of maybe ten individuals who were all reporting together. We were kind of a team.”
Though it was two weeks, those two weeks were a pivotal time for Caramazza and her team. “I felt like I had to put on a brave face and be, like, ‘We're doing this. It's gonna be fine.’ I had to be confident that nothing was gonna happen because I didn't want to exacerbate the general anxiety that was already present in the encampment.”
In total, the team filmed nearly seventy hours of footage. Naturally, they asked themselves what the story would be: “It's our first film, so we didn't really know what we were doing. I think we've already had some films and broadcasts and journalism projects about what happened in the encampment. How can we do something that is actually providing a fresh perspective into the story? And so with our producer, we decided why don't we tell the story of ourselves in a way?”
The student reporters played an incredibly important role in the Columbia encampment. They were responsible for getting information outside, when all eyes were on 116th and Morningside Drive. Student reporters had to rise to the challenge in a situation they could not have imagined being in nor were equipped to handle.
Caramazza describes the challenge in detail. “There was the undergraduate radio WKCR, that was live broadcasting 24/7. And they were one of the only ones that were able to live broadcast the whole thing. I met them the first day of the encampment. It was these fresh-faced undergraduates: nineteen, twenty year olds, standing under the rain, with their little umbrellas, presenting, and they would have technical malfunctions. My heartstrings were tugged, because I can’t imagine being nineteen and being thrown into this. I’m 28, I come with experience for major broadcasters, and I am struggling to report on this story. And here are these eighteen year olds who are still going to their classes, dealing with not sleeping, juggling life, broadcasting 24/7, and learning on the job what it’s like to report.” For Caramazza, who saw and reported on the encampments from the start, this is the story she wants to tell. This is her story.
“I want to keep making work that pushes the limits. I feel like if I don't do something about a subject that no one wants to touch and no one wants to approach, I'm not happy. I'm constantly pushing myself to do things that not everyone has the ability to: to touch upon these very polarizing subjects because maybe they are more at risk.”
Their team is currently in post-production and fundraising for the film, which they’ve named Dispatches.
“This is for our generation. It's for nobody else.”
