Everybody to Kenmure Street: Glasgow protest documentary captures the power of community action

In early 2021, then home secretary Priti Patel outlined the Conservative government’s ‘New Plan for Immigration’, which the following May looked a lot like most old plans for immigration when, without warning, officials pulled two Sikh men from their home on Glasgow’s Kenmure Street as a first step towards deportation. The spontaneous gathering of neighbours attempting to prevent this, soon swollen by other people drawn by social media, led to an eight-hour stand-off in the street, with one man lying under the Home Office van to stop it leaving.

Felipe Bustos Sierra’s documentary about these events deftly blends three strands. It initially captures the building tension through split-screens, simultaneous views of the social media clips that spread the word at the time. Bustos Sierra adds retrospective interviews with several of those involved, while the words of the man under the van are delivered by a horizontal Emma Thompson, one of the film’s executive producers. The film also offers local historical context: the name Kenmure relates to the seat of a family that made money from slave estates in Jamaica, abuses that funded the Scottish industrial revolution. Glasgow’s tradition of collective action is represented on site: Eileen Reid, daughter of 1970s trade union leader Jimmy Reid, was one of those filming.

All of this makes the community’s decision to impede the efforts of the government feel organic, coherent and social. Colourful banners are spontaneously hung from windows in the street. Pizza arrives. On the other side, there’s nothing but anonymous bureaucracy. This is the UK Home Office acting; Police Scotland only arrives later, and when it does it reports to the Scottish government run by the SNP and not the Tories in London at all. Post Covid lockdown, but not by much, the law officers in Kenmure Street wear medical or respirator masks and are apparently unarmed, theoretically precluding the kind of political terrorism now being practised by men in a similar line of work in the US, masked for a different reason. Whether armed officers lurked around the corner in Glasgow is an unspoken question.

It’s a flashpoint of successful civic intervention and pride, while broader historical tides roll over and above everyone. Aamer Anwar, the lawyer and campaigner who helps negotiate the eventual resolution, delivers a victorious oration via megaphone about the effectiveness of collective action and the political ties that bind communities together, adding: “Don’t forget we have the demonstration for Palestine on Sunday.”

► Everybody to Kenmure Street is in UK cinemas 13 March.