‘Everybody to Kenmure Street’ Review: A Vital and Inspiring Portrait of Spontaneous Collective Action

If you have eyes, ears, a heart, and/or a soul, one of the few reassurances amid the hellishness of modern times is seeing people push back en masse against injustice and persecution — people risking their own safety for their neighbors through direct action, or marching to be counted among those who won’t stand for the poison policies of imperialism and rising authoritarianism. If not every protest achieves tangible results in the moment, the perseverance of those on the right side of history should not be discounted. Seeing how fast ordinary people can adapt and organize to create change through civil resistance can spark a flame that spreads across the world.

Directed by Felipe Bustos Sierra, the inspiring documentary “Everybody to Kenmure Street” thrillingly explores one such example of ordinary people coming together in large numbers to do something extraordinary. But before getting into the specifics of one significant day in Glasgow, Scotland, the film takes us on a nearly seven-minute journey through the development of the city, issues that have affected its communities, and the city’s history of protests — from trade unionists feuding with Maggie Thatcher to Glasgow’s own version of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. This moving montage is set to a cover of Lee Hazlewood’s “Your Sweet Love” as performed by Rachel Sermanni, Alana Rae, and Barry Burns of the band Mogwai, the latter of whom also composed the documentary’s effective score.

The film’s title references instructions sent out by activist networks on May 13, 2021, directing anyone who could assist to come to that street in the Pollokshields district of Glasgow. On the dawn of Eid al-Fitr, an immigration enforcement van arrived in this largely Muslim and South Asian neighborhood, where two men of Indian origin were taken from their home on Kenmure Street and detained in the vehicle for alleged violations. The van had the branding of the UK Home Office, the abrupt morning raid being in line with the hostile policies of the interior ministry, then led by Conservative home secretary Priti Patel.

Before the van could drive away, one quick thinker crawled under it and stayed there for the duration of the eight-hour protest that followed. Initially, a few people that showed up just sat around the vehicle. As officers from Police Scotland were called in, the number of Glaswegians showing up at Kenmure Street in solidarity with the two detainees – who were known neighbors to a few local residents, but complete strangers to the vast majority of attendees – grew from double digits to hundreds to seemingly well over a thousand.

“Everybody to Kenmure Street” isn’t Chilean-Belgian filmmaker Sierra’s first documentary about residents of Scotland demonstrating the power of protest. A Best Feature winner at the BAFTA Scotland Awards, “Nae Pasaran” (2018) explores how Rolls Royce factory workers in East Kilbride of the 1970s were assigned to fix engines for planes used by the Pinochet dictatorship for domestic repression, which had arrived at the Scottish factory in need of repair. Refusing to perform the necessary inspections because of what the engines would be used for, the team let them rust in the back of the factory, resulting in half of the Chilean air force being grounded. Those engines had been used in the bombing of the Chilean presidential palace, resulting in the destruction of the country’s democratic government. In that film, Sierra reunites key protest-organizers from the factory’s workforce to tell their own accounts, while also presenting an overview of the Chilean dictatorship’s horrors.

At one point in “Nae Pasaran,” someone posits that the factory employees’ protest was “an anecdote barely remembered, but it is extremely important.” That sentiment is applicable to the film itself, as its now elderly subjects discover — and are palpably moved by — the extent to which their boycott has resonated with Chilean families for over four decades. For Sierra’s follow-up film, a quote delivered early on in “Everybody to Kenmure Street” also works as a thesis statement on the storytelling approach of the documentary. A participant suggests that while no one really knew what was going to happen, the expectation of those who showed up to Kenmure Street that day wasn’t that they could change the situation for the detained men, but that they would at least “be witnesses to something.”

There were an estimated 2,500 witnesses on the ground, and about 2,000 of them recorded at least snippets of what happened, be it on their smartphones or more traditional cameras (with some TV station crew showing up across the day). Starting the day after the protest, Sierra combed social media to find all the footage he could to shape a coherent picture of the day’s events from all these disparate sources and vantage points.

As a feat of editing, the documentary is particularly impressive in its propulsive pacing and its conveyance of a real sense of steady escalation, while always maintaining spatial coherence with the setting despite the fact that no single amateur cameraperson on the day had the clearest view of the action at all times. Some were very far back from the van, while others were so close to the police officers surrounding it that you can almost taste their breath through the screen.

With the sheer quantity of cameras on the day, it makes sense that at least a few specific events would have been captured from different angles, so Sierra and editor Colin Monie are able to pepper in split-screen sequences of developments across the protest. A perspective you certainly don’t get to see, or hear, is that of anyone who wasn’t there in Pollokshields on the day. There’s no input from acting politicians at the time looking back, nor someone representing Police Scotland with reflections on how things were handled. There’s certainly no airtime given to anyone connected to the Home Office in London, who characterized the protestors as a “mob” the next day, having not responded to any of Police Scotland’s calls during the demonstration.

Everyone interviewed on camera is someone who showed up to Kenmure Street or lived there, though the names of many of the warm, frequently witty taking heads or narrators are relegated to the film’s closing credits – with the exception of human rights lawyer and political activist Aamer Anwar, who helped to negotiate the release of the two detainees with no chance for further arrest. Other speakers have their identities made clear through other forms of contextual exposition outside of onscreen text. Among them is Roza Salih, a member of the group “Glasgow Girls,” who in 2005, while still in high school, campaigned against dawn raids, raised public awareness of the poor treatment of asylum seekers, and found support in the Scottish Parliament.

It’s actually not entirely accurate to say that everyone who addresses the camera in the minimal non-archival material is someone who was actually there at the protest. For myriad reasons, certain protestors may not have wanted to explicitly identify themselves for posterity even years after the fact. So, a few of them — including the nicknamed “van man” — seemingly shared insights with the production while maintaining their anonymity through their recollections being performed by actors in scenes of staged reconstruction.

Despite the seriousness of the situation, “Everybody to Kenmure Street” is not a film without humor, much of it sardonic wit characteristic of the general Glaswegian disposition. Emma Thompson – also one of the film’s executive producers – spends all of her screen time portraying the “van man” while pretending to be trapped under a van herself, which adds a real lightness to the proceedings. Another recurring sight gag from the archival footage is far less deliberate: that of a poster for Michael B. Jordan movie “Without Remorse” on the bus stop that became a hub for snacks and drinks for protestors.

Focusing the input on the participants, rather than trying to “both sides” the situation, is of great benefit to the specific story the film is trying to tell. But while not cynical about the actions taken on Kenmure Street, Sierra is wise to not make his inspirational doc an entirely utopian vision of its setting. The Black Lives Matter protest glimpsed in the opening montage includes a sign that says “Slavery Built Glasgow,” and partway through the runtime, the film takes a detour to dive into the history behind Pollokshields’ development, much of it connected to a landowner family who made their fortune in sugar plantations via enslaved people. Elsewhere, references are made to Pollokshields and surrounding south Glasgow areas previously being targeted by far-right demonstrations.

The point of this material is not to downplay the events that day in Kenmure Street, nor the ongoing activism that persists in the city as UK governmental policies towards immigrants lean further right. Pointing out that the city of Glasgow developing an “anti-racist” brand in the modern day, despite having been built on the back of racist violence and exploitation, is not meant as a “gotcha” to undermine the efforts of those citizens with a sincere rejection of hate in their hearts. Rather, it is a vital reminder that, no matter where you live, the past and present must always be in conversation if we ever want to see a brighter future.