Everybody to Kenmure Street left this year’s Sundance Film Festival with a major award in World Cinema Documentary competition: a Special Jury Award for Civil Resistance.
The civil resistance in question is this: On the morning of May 13, 2021, agents from the UK’s Home Office attempted to conduct an immigration raid in Glasgow, Scotland, seizing two Sikh men and hauling them off to an awaiting van. But residents of Kenmure Street weren’t having it. Led by “Van Man” – a mysterious individual who latched hold of the vehicle’s axle – residents of the street surrounded the agents and refused to let them pass. Thus began a standoff with repercussions that would be felt in the UK, the U.S. and anywhere governments are trying to demonize immigrants for political gain.
Director Felipe Bustos Sierra joins the latest edition of Deadline’s Doc Talk podcast to discuss his film, which also has screened at the Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival in Greece, the Glasgow Film Festival, Doc10 in Chicago, the Miami Film Festival and is set to screen June 3 and June 10 at the Sydney Film Festival in Australia. It also, importantly, screened in Minneapolis, where earlier this year ICE agents shot dead two unarmed U.S. citizens.
Bustos Sierra, who lived in Glasgow at the time of the Kenmure Street raid, tells us why he initially felt the protest had no chance of success. And he explains how he eventually contacted Van Man, whose identity remains secret, and how he got Oscar winner Emma Thompson to play him in the documentary (she’s also an executive producer of the film).
Bustos Sierra, whose parents were exiled from Chile during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, tells us why Glasgow might have been the worst place in the UK for the Home Office to conduct an immigration raid. As he explains, it’s been a crossroads of the world for centuries, becoming home to successive waves of Scots Highlanders, Irish, Jews, Southeast Asians and other groups. And they have a tradition of sticking up for their community.
Everybody to Kenmure Street opened theatrically on May 22 in New York and will be released in Los Angeles and additional cities in the coming weeks.
Heed the call of Everybody to Kenmure Street on the new episode of Doc Talk hosted by John Ridley (12 Years a Slave, Shirley) and Matt Carey, Deadline’s senior documentary editor. The pod is a production of Deadline and Ridley’s Nō Studios.
Listen to the episode above or on major podcast platforms including Spotify, iHeart and Apple.
