A documentary of inventive urgency, Everybody to Kenmure Street revisits a 2021 confrontation between the residents of a Glasgow neighborhood and the authorities after immigration agents detained two men who were living there. The standoff began when one neighbor slid under the detention van holding the men and clung to an axle; soon after, others gathered around the vehicle, sitting on the ground to block its departure. An escalating stalemate followed, as increasing numbers of Scottish police swarmed the neighborhood, to be met by nearly 2,000 protesting citizens. Director Felipe Bustos Sierra interviews a wide range of protesters, all of whom express a variation of wry, Scottish practicality. (“These are our neighbors,” one of them shrugs, referring to the detained men.) The doc’s inspired conceit, however, involves actors playing a few of the crucial figures, each of whom introduce their segment by saying, “This isn’t my face, but these are my words.” And so Emma Thompson appears as “Van Man,” who lasted the roughly eight-hour ordeal thanks to food and water shared by fellow protestors and advice from a nurse on the scene. Squished on her side in a tight space, looking into the camera, Thompson/Van Man says, “I was just so lucky to have good friends and good strangers around me.” Sierra expands the film’s scope to provide important historical context—including a lengthy detour explaining that Kenmure Street is named for a family who earned their wealth by exploiting people and resources in Jamaica and India—but it’s this sentiment of neighborly care that distinguishes the movie, especially at a time when so many governments demonize and target immigrants and refugees. Indeed, the dawn raid documented here was planned for the Muslim holiday of Eid, undoubtedly as a provocation. The neighborhood’s response offers another way of living together, as when a member of the local mosque describes moving their Eid festival outside, to be part of the protests. “We thought, let’s make a wee Eid celebration of this,” he says, demonstrating a joyous pluralism that the fearmongerers of this world could never imagine.
(8/2/2026)
