In January 2026, when Felipe Bustos Sierra premiered his new feature documentary Everybody To Kenmure Street in Sundance, the mood in Park City was “emotionally charged.” His film is about neighbours and activists in the south side of Glasgow who, in the early summer of 2021, came together in an act of inspirational civil resistance to prevent the immigration authorities taking away two residents from their community.
At the same time the film showed in Sundance, the ICE raids in Minneapolis were still going on as part of the Trump administration’s vicious policy against immigrants. This gave the Kenmure Street documentary, sold by The Party Film Sales and opening the Glasgow Film Festival, an added topical resonance and urgency.
When tickets for Glasgow Film festival UK premiere of the documentary went on sale, they were all snapped up within seven minutes. There is also a cast and crew screening which Bustos Sierra predicts will be “a real celebration” for the 200 or so people involved in the project over the five years of its production.
“In Scotland, we always felt that the police reaction on Kenmure Street had been already over the top, but it was nothing compared to what Americans are experiencing,” the director reflects. He is the son of a Chilean refugee from the Pinochet period and understands well the anguish of forced displacement.
The events at Kenmure Street are etched on his mind. He was nearby when the protests were happening.
“I lived in Govanhill at the time of the Kenmure Street protests, which is only a 10-minute walk away. I received the same text messages as everybody else,” Bustos Sierra remembers. However, for once, he didn’t heed the call. Thinking things would “turn out badly,” he ended up staying away.
“I failed as a human being that day and also I missed out on that collective expression of empathy,” he expresses his regret at not attending.
Speaking to young people who had been to Kenmure Street on that day, he realised that, for many, it was their first day of protest. That’s partly why the documentary opens with a montage of archive imagery showing Glasgow through the years. As these images make very clear, the protests on Kenmure Street follow in a very long tradition of civil disobedience and political defiance in the city stretching back “decades and centuries.”
There is footage of Jimmy Reid, the inspirational trade union activist who led the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders Work-in in the early 70s against plans by the Tory government led by Edward Heath to close down the shipyards.
Reid’s daughter, Eileen, features in the film. She lives close to Kenmure Street, and filmed some of the protests from her flat. There is also footage of Nelson Mandela coming to the city.
Over the course of the film, the director uses different storytelling devices: interviews in a green screen studio in Glasgow, archive, verité – and even Oscar winner Emma Thompson (who is one of the film’s executive producers) performing the words of the near-mythical ‘van man,” the courageous protestor who lay underneath the home office immigration van to stop it driving away. Actor Kate Dickie plays an off-duty nurse who joined the protests and made sure that ‘van man’ remained safe throughout the many hours he was beneath the vehicle.
“Very early, we realised safeguarding was an important issue in this film,” the director explains why he used actors to protect those wary of appearing on camera.
“The protests happened during Covid, during lockdown,” the director explains that it wasn’t easy to be on the streets shooting in this period. In their aftermath, he had gone for long walks in Queen’s Park with people who had taken part, hearing their stories and “figuring out the mechanics” of the film. This, he realised, had been a “leaderless” protest which was community-driven and had seemed to start organically.
Bustos Sierra would always ask his walking companions if they had any footage of the protests. Many did. They had been filming on their phones. Material from the day was also widely available on social media. He can’t put an exact number on the amount of material he sifted through but suggests it was in the region of 100 hours.
“On a technical level, it was incredibly difficult and challenging. There were all these different formats and frame rates…” Bustos Sierra acknowledges. “But there was a great sense of urgency to all the footage we were getting. It was about finding a balance between how we could make this cohesive and coherent, but also keep the urgent, split second feeling we were getting from all this footage. It was a very tricky process.”
Funding for the project came together slowly. That meant there were four months of editing spread over a period of about four years.
Emma Thompson had seen and admired his previous film, Nae Pasaran (2018), about a group of workers at a car factory in East Kilbride in the mid-1970s who refuse to repair engines for the Chilean airforce because of their opposition to Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile. “We had been in touch since then and she is an activist herself.”
The filmmaker’s intention is to give audiences “a sensory, immersive experience,” so they can understand what it would have been like to be a protester on Kenmure Street on that morning in May five years ago. One of his core beliefs is that “ordinary” people can achieve “extraordinary” feats when they work together. They don’t need to rely on individual heroes to carry them through.
Bustos Sierra tried to engage some of the police officers involved in the stand-off on Kenmure Street. “It was really key for us to try to figure out the dynamic of power,” he says. “We didn’t get very far unfortunately…but we also felt that whether it’s politicians or government institutions, they all had their platform in a way that the protestors didn’t.”
He hopes instead that his film gives a “visceral” perspective on events from the “ground level,” through the eyes of the protestors themselves.
At one stage, police began to charge the protestors and the mood threatened to become very ugly. Ultimately, though, unlike in Minneapolis, full-scale violence was avoided. There was a “positive outcome.” After nearly eight hours, the two Sikh men detained, Sumit Sehdev and Lakhvir Singh, were released.
Bustos Sierra produced the film alongside Ciara Barry through Barry Crerar Films. Screen Scotland were supporters early on. There was some crowd funding too through a Kickstarter campaign. The project was pitched at markets including The Edinburgh Pitch, Sheffield MeetMarket and BFI LFF Works-in-Progress. The Al Jazeera backing came after the film won an award at Cannes Docs last summer. In Sundance, the documentary won a Special Jury Award for Civil Resistance after its screening in the World Cinema Documentary Competition.
Conic will be releasing the film in the UK and Ireland on March 13th. The Glasgow Film Festival premiere is on 25 February.
