(L-R) Colin Monie, Tabassum Niamat, Felipe Bustos Sierra, and Ciara Barry attend the Everybody To Kenmure Street Premiere during the 2026 Sundance Film Festival at The Yarrow Theatre on January 22, 2026 in Park City, Utah. (Photo by Arturo Holmes/Getty Images for Sundance Film Festival)

By Erik Adams

Throughout Everybody To Kenmure Street, director Felipe Bustos Sierra puts Glasgow, Scotland’s history of protest and resistance on screen. Suffragettes campaigning in the early 20th century, trade unionists earning victories over the Conservative U.K. governments of the 1970s, locals making apartheid-era South African officials conduct business in a building renamed for a then-jailed Nelson Mandela — all asserting a commitment to justice and equity in Scotland’s largest city.

So what sets the events of Bustos Sierra’s documentary apart? Their spontaneity, for one: When Sumit Sehdev and Lakhvir Singh were detained by immigration officers on the morning of May 13, 2021, hundreds of their neighbors from Glasgow’s Pollokshields area showed up to halt the van that held the duo. And for another: The protest was documented en masse and in real time by its participants.

Bustos Sierra, however, wasn’t one of them. Feeling a bit of pessimism about the state of civil resistance circa 2021, he stayed home. But as he says at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, where Everybody To Kenmure Street is screening as part of the World Cinema Documentary Competition, he checked social media a few hours after the protest to see that Sehdev and Singh had been released. And that gave him an idea for a movie.

“I think initially it was just a response to ‘What happened? Why did I miss out?’” he says. “And within a few days of talking to people who lived on the street and who did go, I said, ‘I think there’s a story here.’”

And that story is nothing short of inspiring: scores of ordinary people banding together in support of two men most of them had never met. Many of them sit for interviews with Bustos Sierra; one appears to be wearing the exact same floral-printed shirt in the protest footage and the interview footage, underlining how recently the events of Everybody To Kenmure Street took place.

There were some interviewees, however, whose identities the filmmakers wanted to protect — like the “van man” who dove beneath the Immigration Enforcement vehicle and wrapped his arm around the axle. The solution: Have some of the U.K.’s most celebrated actors recite their testimonials. These sequences are staged as if they’re happening on the day of the protest, always signaled by a nine-word preface: “This isn’t my face, but these are my words.” The idea came out of conversations with Emma Thompson, who wrote to Bustos Sierra in response to his previous film, Nae Pasaran, and is an executive producer of Everybody To Kenmure Street.

“I realized, maybe we can record these people’s voices and have an actor portray them,” Bustos Sierra says. “And I thought it would be so fucking funny to have Emma Thompson jump under a van. And I just asked, and she said yes. Filmmaking is so easy.”

The timeliness of the documentary is not lost on Bustos Sierra or the Festival audience. One of the interviewees in Everybody To Kenmure Street, Tabassum Niamat, notes during the post-film Q&A that the types of policies and tactics enacted on screen in the film persist to this day.  Similarities to Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations across the United States in recent months were drawn during the introduction and post-film Q&A. Still, Niamat sounds a note of hope.

“Don’t be disheartened. We see what’s happening in America. We saw what happened with Renee [Good]. We were watching everything across the globe. It’s not fair. It’s no way for Americans to live, for British people to live. So when you get a chance to make a stand, make that stand.”