Felipe Bustos Sierra’s “Everybody to Kenmure Street” is a powerful portrait of a neighborhood rallying around two of its own in the face of injustice. The film depicts the 2021 protests in the Pollokshields neighborhood of Glasgow, in which citizens took to the streets to protest the detention of two men for alleged immigration violations and secured their release after eight hours. But while all of the events took place in one day, Sierra understood that the film’s story began far earlier.
During a conversation with IndieWire’s Chris O’Falt at our Art of the Doc event in Los Angeles, Sierra explained why the film had to contextualize the long history of social justice activism in Glasgow. Pollokshields is the most diverse neighborhood in Scotland, with 86 languages spoken among its residents, and has always been seen as something of a safe haven for those fleeing persecution. The Kenmure Street protests might have seemed spur-of-the-moment, but in many ways they were a product of people’s connection to their city’s history.
“It came out of all these early conversations, of myself not seeing possibility or hope. When I was asking people ‘what brought you to the street?,’ ‘what actually made you take your body on the street?,’ which is what was necessary, they often talked about having no hope either. But they had that specific connection to Glasgow’s history,” Sierra said of the film’s origins.” It was always variations of fighting for women’s rights, civil rights, queer rights, housing conditions, working conditions. This shared humanity, we had to find a way to put it in the film. Of course it was a very spontaneous protest. It was the very first protest for many people who turned up. But there had been this transmission of knowledge of history, of care, and that clearly came out.”
Watch the complete conversation with Sierra in the video above.
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