| Photo: Courtesy of Glasgow Film Festival
13 years ago, Chilean-Belgian filmaker Felipe Bustos Sierra visited East Kilbride to find out more about a story he had heard since early childhood: the story of factory workers who downed tools and endured poverty rather than work on parts for Chilean fighter planes in the early days of the Pinochet regime. His visit led to the making of a short film which would, over the next five years, evolve into a feature of the same name, Nae Pasaran. He remarked at the time on how struck he was by the Scottish workers’ commitment to solidarity, and a couple of years ago, an incident in the nearby city of Glasgow struck him in a similar way. Everybody To Kenmure Street, which screened at Sundance and will open the 2026 Glasgow Film Festival, chronicles the events of 13 May 2021.
It’s rare to be able to put together a documentary after the fact and find so much footage that there is barely any need to cut away to other material – not to mention so many camera angles that it’s easy to cut it to look cinematic. This happened in part because of the sheer number of people who were present on that day, with their phones, and because of the news crews which arrived once it got going – but it’s also because the whole thing emerged from a determination to bear witness. The first witnesses we hear from are those who started filming from their tenement windows, and their efforts give us our first glimpse of how it all began.
A white van with flashy markings and ‘immigration enforcement’ written on its sides – one woman describes it as ‘blatant’. Two police cars there as an escort. It was very early. People were getting ready for work, getting their kids up for school. others were heading to the mosque for early prayers because – just to add to the insensitivity of it all – it was Eid.
“I didn’t really know what I was going to do when I went out onto the street,” says one man. “I just knew that I had to do something.”
“They’re part of the community and they were now in this van. That was enough for me,” says another.
The people in the van were Sumit Sehdev and Lakhvir Singh, but it was a while before anybody knew that. They texted and messaged friends, they posted on social media, and they went down and put their bodies in the way of that van on point of principle. Bustos Sierra tracks how it came together – how quickly a dozen people became 1,500, as people heard what was happening and travelled from all over the city to join them. How one man (who prefers to remain anonymous, so his words are delivered by an actor) dived underneath the van and refused to move; how one of the prisoners, a mechanic by trade, realised he was there and worried that he could be killed as more police officers climbed into the van; how an off-duty nurse did what she could to take charge of his care. How what began as a random collection of people quickly evolved into a gathering in which almost everyone had a job and there was toilet access, a first aid station, a free snack bar with water, a supply of blankets, and much more.
As he takes is through that day, Bustos Sierra intercuts the footage with interviews with numerous participants. He introduces the film with a dense montage illustrating key moments in Glasgow’s history of industry and resistance, providing important context. Later we hear from Eileen Reid, daughter of legendary trade unionist Jimmy Reid, providing a connection between past and present, and there is reflection on the significance of the chain of dedicated activists through whom the spirit and craft of resistance have been passed down.
The film also takes a sojourn into the history of the slave trade and Glasgow’s role in it, and the associated legacy of the tobacco barons, thus acknowledging the complexity of the city’s legacy. In other regards, viewers are trusted to have some awareness of context. One man explains how, high up in his flat overlooking the scene, he made a banner which read ‘If this is Team UK, we reject it,’ attracting cheers when he hung it from his window. In the footage we see another man tell the police that they shouldn’t be there “defending the immigration and defending the UK.” The idea of a van coming up from London to take away members of the community feels very much like an incursion into Scotland’s sovereignty. Exacerbating that is the widely attested claim that Scottish ministers spent all day trying to contact the UK government to discuss the issue, and were met with a wall of silence.
This inter-national dimension to the conflict raised the stakes. Towards the end of the film, there is interesting input from well known lawyer Aamer Anwar, explaining his analysis of the situation on the day and his awareness that it could easily have resulted in violence, with far-reaching consequences. It was this, he says, that led him to get involved and negotiate a solution – one which has had far-reaching consequences of its own, though the film does not go into those. Viewers may be aware of similar stand-offs between the public and immigration officials in Edinburgh, London and elsewhere, whose participants directly cited the Kenmure Street incident as inspiration.
There is a great deal of detail in the film, including concern about some of the decisions made by the police. We don’t get their perspective, but they are not treated wholly unsympathetically; it’s clear that at least some of the protestors saw them as caught between a sense of duty to the UK and duty to the people of Scotland, as well as lacking any in-depth knowledge of immigration law.
In Scotland at least, many of those coming to the film will already have a good bit of background on it, but even for those who were present on the day, there are likely to be revelations. The sheer number of contributors is impressive; still more so, the fact that every contribution adds something, helping to build up the story and flesh it out. There is a real sense of momentum throughout, and it’s an intentionally emotional viewing experience. perhaps the most poignant moment comes when one of the prisoners recalls the woman leading the enforcement operation asking him who he was, that so many people had come out for him. Elsewhere, a woman remarks on what it felt like to realise that all these people were her neighbours whom she’d never seen.
Like every city, Glasgow contains racist elements – there is talk of volunteers elsewhere blocking streets so that the far right couldn’t get there and start causing trouble – but it’s rare to get such a clear example of how many people feel that everyone is welcome, and that once you’re a part of Glasgow, Glasgow will defend you. That’s not the only rare thing on display here, and most viewers will leave the film feeling uplifted, with a renewed sense of possibility.
Reviewed on: 29 Jan 2026
