Felipe Bustos Sierra’s “Everybody to Kenmure Street” is a powerful portrait of a neighborhood uniting around two of its own in protest of injustice. The film depicts the 2021 protests in Glasgow’s Pollokshields neighbourhood, in which citizens took to the streets to protest the detention of two people for alleged immigration violations and secured their release after eight hours. But while all the events took place in a single day, Sierra understood that the film’s story began much earlier.
During a conversation with IndieWire’s Chris O’Fault at our Art of the Doc event in Los Angeles, Sierra explained why the film had to contextualize Glasgow’s long history of social justice activism. Pollokshields is the most diverse area in Scotland, with residents speaking 86 languages and has always been seen as a safe haven for those fleeing persecution. The protests on Kenmure Street may have seemed improvised, but in many ways they were the result of people’s connection to the history of their city.
“It came out of all these early conversations, I didn’t see possibility or hope myself. When I was asking people ‘What brought you to the street?’, ‘What exactly made you take your body to the street?’, which was essential, they would often talk about having no hope. But they had a specific connection to the history of Glasgow,” Sierra said of the genesis of the film. It was always about women’s rights, civil rights, gay rights, housing conditions, There was this shared humanity, of course, that was a very spontaneous protest for many people, and it came across clearly.
Watch the full conversation with Sierra in the video above.
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