8 hours ago
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It was a clear spring morning in May 2021 when UK Immigration Enforcement picked the day of Eid al-Fitr to swoop on a property in the most diverse area of Glasgow and detain two men living there. Eight hours later, the men were released back into their community following one of the most spontaneous and effective acts of civil resistance in recent memory – after hundreds of local people surrounded the van, preventing it from driving away.
Five years on, with attitudes to migrant detention hardening across the UK and violence towards protesters spiralling in the US, the documentary Everybody to Kenmure Street, directed by Felipe Bustos Sierra, tells the story of that extraordinary day.
A granular anatomy of a protest and also a love letter to community, the film has already scooped a special jury award at Sundance. It sets out what can happen when a bunch of strangers decide today is the day they’ll be the change – and how that changes them thereafter. The majority of the film draws on footage taken by participants on the day, sourced from social media and individuals, then painstakingly assembled over four and a half years to show the developing scene from every possible viewpoint. It’s a forensic counter to the misinformation so often ascribed to online sources.
Reporting on Kenmure Street that day as the Guardian’s Scotland correspondent, I can recall how the initial speed of mobilisation was a testament to the branching activist networks that have rooted in Glasgow’s southside for over a century. But not everyone who answered the call was a protest veteran. Through leisurely interviews, Bustos Sierra introduces the neighbour who ran on to the street in his pyjamas, the community activist responding to a text alert, the local imam, the schoolkid on his way to biology class – all drawn by the pull of this single event.
A question mark remains about whether the home office had thought through the provocation of conducting a raid like this on Eid. “But,” says Bustos Sierra, “I did love that the initial outrage was replaced by, ‘We’re ready.’ They’d been prepared spiritually for this [during the fast of Ramadan]. It was a day to gather together and celebrate.” As one Muslim activist puts it: “They had the time. We had the water.”
Water and more. As the day progressed, the nearby bus shelter became a makeshift fuel station, stocked with donated drinks and snacks, including someone’s Eid cake. “The thing that struck me early on was the safety net around solidarity,” says Bustos Sierra, who grew up in Belgium after his Chilean father fled Pinochet’s bloody coup in 1973. Kenmure Street marked “a practical shift” in how protest was done prompted by Black Lives Matter, he argues. “The goal first was about creating a safe space, so that more people felt able to turn up.”
But the film, and the protest itself, are also grounded in Glasgow’s own heritage and he lightly incorporates archive footage of rent strikes and shipyard occupation. Indeed, the director’s award-winning debut Nae Pasaran unspooled a similar yarn about the global impact of local courage, interviewing the Scottish Rolls Royce workers who refused to repair jet engines for the Chilean airforce in protest at the Pinochet regime.
“They were surrounded by people who have done this for decades,” says Bustos Sierra, referencing younger activists who attended – people like Roza Salih, one of the Glasgow Girls who fought for detention of their Kosovan school friend in the noughties and forced an end to child detention in the UK.
Nor does he gloss over Glasgow’s deep associations with the transatlantic slave trade. As Zandra Yeaman, curator at The Hunterian in Glasgow, acknowledges: “We like to think of ourselves as anti-racist, radical, willing to stand up for people’s rights, but we are also a city built off the back of enslaved African people.”
Of course, the whole protest was enabled by one singular act of courage by an activist who slipped under the officials’ vehicle just after breakfast and wrapped his arm around the axle. Swerving any accompanying hero worship, “Van Man” has chosen to remain anonymous ever since.
In the film, his recollections are voiced by Emma Thompson, an admirer of Nae Pasaran and executive producer on this project. Bustos Sierra says he wanted to reflect “the sense of defiance and mischief that people brought”, and it’s a moment of great charm when Thompson, seen on camera squished beneath a chassis, pulls down her face mask and, in the role of Van Man, tells the viewer: “This isn’t my face but these are my words.”
In 2021, the Kenmure Street protest was taken as further evidence of the quintessentially Glasgwegian imperative of welcoming refugees. Five years on, anti-immigration sentiment is building and Reform UK is set to win a swathe of seats in May’s Holyrood elections.
“People need to hear a story like this now, says Pinar Aksu, another of the younger activists Bustos Sierra interviews. “We don’t always have a victory at the end of our stories, but hope is all we’ve got.”
Despite living within walking distance of the protest, Bustos Sierra didn’t answer the call himself because, he admits: “I didn’t think anything positive would come of it.” He’s come to understand the film as an act of atonement, he laughs. “And we need to remember: if we don’t turn up, nothing happens. I missed out on that collective joy and expression of empathy which to me is happiness. The point is you just have to keep turning up.”
