Everybody To Kenmure Street: we speak to director Felipe Bustos Sierra about his joyous documentary

In May 2021, on the first day of Eid, a UK Home Office dawn raid to detain two Sikh men who had lived 10 years in the Glasgow’s Southside, one of Scotland’s most diverse neighbourhoods. Residents took to the street to stop the deportation of their neighbours. 

As word spread that morning a clutch of protestors swelled to hundreds of people, flooding Kenmure Street and blocking movement of the immigration enforcement van. The eight-hour stand-off made international headlines as the community organised itself in an extraordinary act of peaceful solidarity. Everybody To Kenmure Street is BAFTA-winner Felipe Bustos Sierra’s documentary about this spontaneous, successful, and joyful act of civil resistance.  

On the day itself it didn’t feel inevitable at all, the way that it worked out. I think that you’ve captured that perfectly with the film. 

It was a hard film to make in that context. Because there was such a positive outcome, it was difficult to kind of put people back in the space of ‘but did you actually think that was possible?’ Most people are going ‘Of course, of course’. But it was looking pretty bleak on the day we didn’t know if it was going to come through. That’s the challenge of making a film after the fact.

There’s only a point in making a film about something if you can add something to it. A big part of it was that although I lived in Govanhill at the time I missed out on the protest; I received the same pictures in the morning [as others did]. Part of it was almost like, can we recreate for people, make something that’s really immersive and let them feel that emotion, make them feel like I felt, and I’m always going to feel like I missed out on.

To let them feel like what it feels like to go to a protest and then eight hours later you get exactly what you want – that’s quite unheard of, especially on that kind of scale. It’s still one street in a neighbourhood of Glasgow but anyone would have lived that and you would have felt kind of transported by what happened. 

You know, the big takeaway which really has come across from being able to show the film in the US while all these ICE protests are happening in Minneapolis is that the film is what we need to see – people who felt that they had no hope turned up anyway and got the best outcome out of it. 

Making that come across to an audience that, you know, you don’t need to come to things just because you think it’s going to work out well, sometimes you just need to show up.

In the film you have Katie Dickie and Emma Thompson speaking the words of two of the key people of the day (the person under the van and the nurse).What was your thinking there and what does that do in the film for you?

The idea of having actors in the film came really early. I started talking to people the day after. It was within that first week I realised that we needed to talk about the way we talk about solidarity. It’s a bigger thing that the way it was being talked about in the press at the time.  Particularly at the time and still now it just feels unreal that going to a protest in support of immigrants is going to turn out well. It feels like everything is stacked up against us at the moment. 

Because of covid, film making was not really a straightforward process. I would every other day go around Queen’s Park for a walk with people who had been at the protest. You know, for an hour or so we’d talk about the mechanics of the protest itself. What got them onto the street… But then you get into bigger questions of how much time in your life do you have for something like this? What was your inspiration for it? What I love is how connected people were to each other. It felt like all of these micro chain reactions were happening throughout the day that connected me to new people every time. 

Obviously, someone I really wanted to talk to early was ‘Van Man’.  I managed to find people who know him. I think he was uncomfortable with the sort of hero worship and the cult of personality. He said ‘Look, I’m happy to talk to you but I don’t want my name out there’. I also think that the more people know about someone the more they get put on a pedestal. 

I thought we’re going to need actors to portray these people and I need to figure out how to do this in a documentary and keep the authenticity of it. How do you get them in and carry a little bit of their sense of humour and all of their contradictions, their sense of defiance and sense of mischief.

It was something to mirror what happened on the day of the protest itself, and the way the crowd quite organically tried to find ways to overcome the situation. There was always this element of surprise. And I thought it would be really funny, if all of a sudden, everybody knew of Van Man, it would be funny to have Emma Thompson crawling underneath the van. So I pitched it to her. I sent her the transcript and within two days she said yes. 

Kate Dickie, I’ve been a fan of and she’d been in touch, we’ve had a conversation about Nae Pasaran. Once I recorded the interview with the nurse I asked. I was really lucky.

When the film opens, straight away you’re putting the protest in the context of the history of resistance in Glasgow: the Rent Strikes, Poll Tax Demonstrations, Shipyard Occupation, the Glasgow Girls, and the like. To me it’s entirely right to do this, but at the time it did surprise me. 

Part of it was that I knew, just because I’ve been involved in the solidarity events for most of my life, there’s always a passing of the baton and you learn from the previous campaign. That kind of history is only conveyed through oral history and can be transformed or embellished or made worse. It can be a little uneven sometimes. Part of it was: how do we convey this sense of history being passed on?

None of these events came out of nowhere. Nobody was expecting a van to turn up, and part of the reason was because everybody knows the Glasgow Girls story. And so they thought ‘Well, the kind of dawn raids that happened there are not going to happen’. It’s exhausting, right? Life is hard enough. All of the pressure you have from keeping a roof over your head, keeping your family together. Looking into the whole hostile environment, it’s very much designed that way. 

Glasgow has such a long history of people rising up and using civil disobedience and resistance and using their body to kind of make invisible injustices visible.

So part of it was using that energy and having that kind of luxury, all that archive of Glasgow’s history of civil disobedience, in a way that it would connect to people that are specifically interviewed from Kenmure Street. We’re given a sense of the kind of history Glasgow has, events like Kenmure Street will always have to happen and will happen because that history is carried somehow.  And the film, in a way, was just a way to expand on this and amplify it in the same way that someone will have to do the same in five years from now.

How’s it all been going since the film’s limited release? You’ve been doing a lot of press and you’ve been showing it all over. What’s the reaction predominantly, do feel?

We never hoped that we’d get into a festival like Sundance. 

So it’s been quite another shock but I also have a pleasant surprise that as soon as the film was finished we got to screen it and we got those really positive, really emotional reactions, straight out the gates. I think it was something quite interesting to people who were like I’ve heard of your film. I’m really excited to see it because of what’s happening in the US at the moment but I feel like I need to have something joyful on the back of it.

I think this is important to see. It’s going to be grim and bleak. It’s about immigration. It’s about deportation and police brutality. And we have to say, oh, there is so much hope and so much joy.

And I keep saying this, but it’s a joyful film because it was a joyful protest. And it was completely people led. It was this intrinsic thing of people just trusting each other, organizing, creating a safe space. And they knew that was the only way out. How do you create a safe space so that more people feel safe and okay to join?

Yeah, I think the film surprises people because it’s a documentary about reality and it’s a reality that… having a happy ending in a kind of reality really seems so unlikely.

Everybody to Kenmure Street premiered at the Glasgow Film Festival and is in UK and Irish cinemas from 13th March