Everybody to Kenmure Street’s bid for Oscar recognition is gaining traction. The film directed by Felipe Bustos Sierra earned a spot on the influential DOC NYC short list of the year’s best documentaries announced on Wednesday. And on Tuesday, the film from executive producer Emma Thompson earned four nominations for the Critics Choice Documentary Awards, including Best Documentary Feature and Best Director.
Bustos Sierra’s film captures a remarkable event that took place in Glasgow, Scotland on May 13, 2021. Early that morning, immigration enforcement agents from the Home Office attempted to grab two Sikh men in a dawn raid but when locals became aware of what was going on they intervened, leading to an extraordinary standoff between law enforcement and members of the community in and around Kenmure Street.
Uniformed officers probably were unaware of the history of that neighborhood and of Glasgow as a whole and how residents there view immigrants.
‘Everybody to Kenmure Street’
Icarus Films
“This is a welcoming place… The south side of Glasgow has been a landing space for immigrants for centuries, since it was created really, [with] working class and immigrants living together,” the filmmaker said after a screening of the film as part of Deadline’s For the Love of Docs event series. “Glasgow has always been seen as a bit of a rebel city… And that history obviously permeates that neighborhood.”
The first person to try to disrupt the attempted immigration raid came to be known as “Van Man.” That individual climbed under the immigration vehicle in which the detainees were being held and latched onto the rear axle. Eventually, as word spread, hundreds of people poured into the street, many recording the events with their cell phone cameras. It became an enormous undertaking for Bustos Sierra and his editor Colin Monie to synchronize all that footage.
Director Felipe Bustos Sierra
Icarus Films
“It was the hardest part of making this film,” Bustos Sierra conceded. “The entire protest is shown… through what people had at hand on the day. We were lucky that two people who lived on the street were professional cameramen and they started filming on the smartphones, but… they went back, got their 4K cameras and managed to capture the second half of the day. But most of it is smartphone cameras and some really bad, some really old ones too.”
He added that some of the video came from activists who had scrubbed the metadata, “which made it really difficult to create an accurate timeline, which we eventually got to, but that was months of work.”
EP Emma Thompson
Nick Haddow
Emma Thompson not only executive produced the film, but she stars in it, in a manner of speaking — playing Van Man. That inventive choice came about after the real van man (who preferred to remain anonymous) said his words from interviews with the director could be used in the film, but he didn’t want to appear in it himself.
“Luckily, I had kept a light correspondence with Emma Thompson after my first film came out about Chile, a country that she has also a strong connection with,” Bustos Sierra explained. “And so, when Van Man told me didn’t want to be in it… you think, ‘What do I have?’ …And I just pictured Emma Thompson going out there and saying, ‘Hey, I’m Van Man.’ It made me laugh like maybe what Van Man did [for] the protest, Emma will do for our film.”
The dramatized sequence, shot in London, involved Thompson climbing onto a rig beneath a van. She was wedged in there like the real guy in Glasgow.
“We did build the rig. We did put her under underneath the van. When she did arrive, she looked at the rig, looked at me and [cinematographer] Kirsten [McMahon] and say, ‘This is the strangest thing anyone’s ever asked me to do.’ …I think she made the discomfort part of her performance. And so, it worked really well.”
Bustos Sierra sees what the people around Kenmure Street did that day as “small revolutionary acts.” He describes their attitude as, “You don’t remove [these men] without valid cause as this was happening. There’s absolutely nothing illegal [done] by these two guys. These are our neighbors and we’re just going to stand for our community.”
Watch the full conversation in the video above.
For The Love of Docs is produced with the long-time support of National Geographic Documentary Films. Films are presented free of charge to the audience and to the filmmakers. The series continues with weekly screenings, followed by conversations with filmmakers through December 1. Join us next week for Seized, directed by Sharon Liese, the story of a police raid on a small-town newspaper in Kansas that triggered a national uproar. To RSVP for the screening, click here.
