“Tenement buildings almost form a natural amphitheater,” one of the residents in the Glasgow neighborhood of the Pollokshields says in “Everybody to Kenmure Street,” reflecting on the day of May 13, 2021 when the gathering on the streets was so big and so loud the whole world could hear. A proudly multicultural community, it was targeted by the UK Home Office for an ill-advised dawn raid as a show of immigration enforcement where Sumit Sehdev and Lakhvir Singh, two Indian nationals that had been living in the area for the better part of a decade, were apprehended in the morning and would’ve surely disappeared into the system by the afternoon had it not been for neighbors that surrounded the van that was set to take them away. Thanks to the quick thinking of a soon-to-be folk hero only known as “Van Man,” who crawled underneath to prevent the vehicle from speeding off, an initial crowd of dozens quickly turned to hundreds then thousands as the day progressed and word spread on social media that an injustice was about to occur.
The event caught the attention of Felipe Bustos Sierra for a few reasons, living not far from where it was unfolding, but also well aware of the Pollokshields’ history of advocacy for the most vulnerable after his previous feature “Nae Pasaran” when local employees of a Rolls Royce factory refused to be complicit in the actions of Chile’s military dictatorship by grounding much of their air fleet when they withheld their service to make repairs. The filmmaker’s unique position on a number of fronts to properly convey the power of the protest on Kenmure Street leads to an exhilarating chronicle of the day and a call to action in its own right with the film, which employs footage from the hundreds of cell phones that were out in the crowds, testimony from each and every corner of the neighborhood and plenty of historical context for why this was the wrong place to look for a fight, particularly when it was intended to be symbolic on the Islamic holiday of Eid.
When those assembled got creative in their protest, bringing along samosas, pakoras and blankets for people to share as they settled in until freedom for the two men was assured, Santos shows similar ingenuity when some subjects requested anonymity out of humility for their heroics and finds a way to recreate the situation anchored by the truth of what happened. Even when interviews were conducted after, the day lives vividly in the mind of all its participants who relate it passionately and the film speaks to a moment when it’s truly inspiring to see people take collective action and show compassion when their governments have none around the world. With the film premiering this week at Sundance where it was met with a rousing reception, Sierra graciously took the time to talk about what it was like capturing the spirit of such a momentous occasion, condensing the region’s rich history of activism into a potent package and finding novel ways to get around the obstacles he faced narratively in bringing this story to the screen.
How did this come about?
It felt like a response to the day. At the time, I lived 10 minutes from where it happened in the south side of Glasgow. And I had friends who live on the street — my producer Ciara [Barry] lives on that street and my first film, “Nae Pasaran,” which was also about solidarity from Scotland but towards Chile, was on TV at the time, so I was getting all these messages, like “This is happening, can you share? So I did all that. But I just felt helpless. It’s even worse now, but in the political climate already at the time, I thought, “This is not going to turn out well. I was keeping track of it on social media, which obviously plays a big part on the day. Then I realize, “Holy shit, this is happening in a completely different way than I expected.” The next day, I was knocking on my pal’s door on the street and [said], “Do you want to have a chat about it? And through word of mouth, I started talking to people that I’d seen in the footage or just knew from the neighborhood and that’s how it grew. Within the first week, I knew there was something new about how solidarity was being expressed, so I’d been organizing the day, even though it was a completely spontaneous event. And within the week, I knew there was something here. I reached out to Ciara and said, “Do you want to do something here? I think there’s something really new and really exciting to talk about.”
Did your previous film “Nae Pasaran,” which was about collective energy, inform how you could tackle this film with all its participants?
It did, and this was about realizing that being on social media on the day almost gave you a better outlook of what was happening than people who were on the streets. It was pretty dense, as you can see from the footage, so I realized I was talking to different pockets of people who maybe hadn’t moved that much throughout the day and were doing their own thing and I knew really early on this would be the film had to be this baton relay storytelling. My personal barometer was, where did you see the hope? And getting everybody to talk to me, not just about what they’d witnessed or what they’d done on the day itself, but getting a sense of what was that first impulse that made you go out onto the street? This has never happened before. Police has never backed down. People have never been detained and then let go home. That doesn’t happen. So what were you trying to achieve?
A lot of people were telling me, “Well, we didn’t have any hope either, but we just knew that this was wrong.” And we had all these examples in Glasgow’s history. Sometimes it’s just oral history within their own family or living in a neighborhood, soaking in their own history, but I think all these elements were coming together. Then [I thought] the people on the street made the day happen, but they’re all bolstered and motivated, inspired by Glasgow’s long history of protests. And Glasgow’s long history of protest is the Western world’s history of protest. it’s always the same issues. Whether it’s women’s rights, civil rights, migrants’ rights, housing conditions, working conditions, it’s the same and often the same people coming out every time to have their say. So it felt like all that really coalesced with what was happening on the street that day.
The film opens with a five-minute history of Glasgow that’s quite inspiring on its own, showing the history of solidarity. Was it difficult to put together to set the film up in this way?
It was for sure. And the song was a great barometer. The final version has the song as it exists now, which is covered by two Scottish female singers and originally, [the song] was meant as a stranger in a relationship after falling out, so we’re playing on that, but here it really felt like it’s generosity and the solidarity of strangers that made the thing happen. But [cutting it together] was a long process. I loved that from working on “Nae Pasaran,” we had nearly half-an-hour of archive and there’s just so much that’s happened in Scottish history that mirrors [the present], a bit like this film, so it was a way of bringing that whole history alive.
My dad was a refugee from Chile and in Chile, they talk about the struggle — “La Lucha” — and that struggle is forever. I thought it was a way of bringing that concept in the context of Kenmure Street, of seeing all these people through generation have done, repeating the same gestures very often in the South Side of Glasgow. Somehow the people that you’re about to meet on the street are directly connected to the people in that history that are being celebrated now and to me, those people need to be celebrated in the same way. So I worked with my editor Colin Mooney, who himself was born in Pollokshields where this happened and has over 30 years of experience as an editor across drama and documentary in Scotland. So it was fantastic to be able to tap into all that knowledge and find those patterns. The film really matches the repetition of gestures and we spent hours looking at our footage and seeing speeches [whether] it’s boycotts, occupations, sit-ins, and [thought] how do we give it a new meaning based on what’s happened on Kenmure Street.
Speaking of which, what was it like to collect all the present day footage? Would you go to interview someone and they’d show you what they captured on their phone?
It was very much like that. The social media stuff that was mostly on Instagram and Twitter at the time created a spine for me to let me know at least there’s a film here that we can tell visually. Then a lot of it was contacting everybody online and say, “We’re thinking of making a documentary, could we use this?” At the time it was COVID lockdown, so before really we could get to the filmmaking part, it was just walks around Queens Park, the local park in the south side of Glasgow for an hour with a different participant almost every day or every other day. That created a circle of trust, which allowed for people to share their footage.
Some people didn’t have any, but they were telling me a story and I [said], Wwell, that sounds too good to be true. And then a week later, somebody says, “I’ve got this footage.” And I would see that moment that was described a week [before] to me and it created that feeling for me that following the points on the day, you think, “This is incredible. And this [social media] has been tailored in part to get more people on the streets,” but then piecing it all together, you realize, “No, no, it just happened as people described it,” so eventually you came to a point where we’re like, “Where are the gaps? What are people describing to us in interviews that we don’t have?” It was interesting to use social media to basically create the spine of this whole film and then filling in the gaps when we could.
I don’t want to spoil how you handle what happens directly around the van, but it’s truly an inventive use of recreation when you want those perspectives in the film, but they aren’t available. How did you figure it out?
That took a while. If we’re talking about the character of Van Man, it did become this mythical figure in Glasgow in the days following the protests. Considering there were hundreds of people filming, this person had managed to just stop filming when he came out and we understood that we need to protect this person. They’ve done something amazing and we need to protect them. So it took a while to get to them. I was talking about that circle of trust, [which] very much was a process of word of mouth. and eventually, [Van Man] said, “I hear you’re looking for me. We could have a chat. But I don’t want to be on camera.” Through him, I also found out about the nurse [also around the van] and it was very much the same process of wanting to share what they’d done because they understand that there is something quite contagious about this, but also there was a thing Van Man told me, “I don’t want people to think that I could do this because I was a big guy. Anybody could have done this. I think I just had the opportunity because I was one of the first people on the streets to just slide underneath the van.”
So it was important not only to safeguard [their identity], but then it was also a way to convey this very Scottish sense of mischief and a great sense of storytelling in Scotland, overturning these preconceived ideas of what kind of person can stop this. [Van Man] was useful for maybe about 15 minutes, and then it just required the nurse to be there to look after him, and then it required all these people surrounding the van, and by the end, that little piece of rock had become a boulder. So we knew we can’t show your face, we don’t want to reveal your identity., but [we asked] “Can we use your words?” [And we were told] that’s no problem, so I thought, we can have an actor. And then a week later, I had the same conversation with the nurse, telling me the same thing.So now we can have those words, but not the person and [I thought] is there something we’re creative we can do about it?
I can tell you like a funny anecdote about this. I’ve done fiction in the past, but it’d been a while. Most of my work for the last 15 years has been documentary, but as you can see in the film, we’re using the Interrotron Errol Morris does [for his interviews] in the [recreations], We wanted to film in the same way with all the actors, but it was more specific. It was less of a flow because they had to be absolutely relaying those words verbatim, so we had this extra device attached behind the Interrotron, just a display so we could project the words on it and up until that point, we’d been editing the film with a guide track of myself, relaying those words to camera, so I’d been very much used to the words as you would know a song. And we built this rig, so [the actor playing Van Man] wouldn’t be underneath the van, but we started the process and I was controlling the flow of the words on my phone, so I had to pay very much attention to what [the actor] was saying so I could basically pace the flow of the words and I got mesmerized. I was so used to hearing my own words. But [this actor] took it and just brought so much joy and so much strength and so much confidence and charisma and that sense of mischief is very much there, I completely forgot about pacing the words. Eventually [the actor] stopped [and said], “Felipe, do you want me to read this or do you want me to act this?” And I was like, “Oh, I’m so sorry. My breath had been taken away” and I was just in the scene with [them], forgetting about directing. But it was a big moment, just seeing what an actor can bring,
Was there anything that changed your ideas of what this was about as you got into the thick of it?
Personally, since I didn’t go on the day, and my family has been the recipient of so much solidarity — my father was on a blacklist in Chile for 15 years as a journalist — there’s an element of [realizing] people are always looking for something new about [taking on authority] but the gestures work. they worked back in the ’70s and ’80s when I was a kid and they worked on Kenmure Street in 2021. And I think sometimes we just need to figure out a way to tell these stories in a way that reaches the audience. More than anything, because we’re making the film so close to what had happened and in the current political climate, we’re not able to probably address everything head on, but it was really important to get a sense that you just had to be there, so [it was important] to convey for people the sensory element of what it would have been like.
Something we discovered while gathering all this footage and maybe sit back [and look at it] was when the people had the presence of mind to shoot a landscape more than portrait mode, you just get a bit of a scale and as filmmakers, we’re just trying to get out of those last 20 minutes because so many people are filming, the footage looks glorious and you just get a sense of that wave of joy that swept through as that [release] unfolded. It made me think of the difference when you’re watching a film at home and you’re watching a film in the cinema. It’s just that collective experience just elevates everything. The process of making this film made me feel like I was there and able to not just respond to it, but maybe expand on it and in some ways, passing it on so maybe other people might feel that.
“Everybody to Kenmure Street” will screen at the Sundance Film Festival on January 30th at 3:30 pm at the Holiday Village Cinemas and January 31st at 5:30 pm at the Library Center Theatre. It will be available online from January 29th through February 1st on the Sundance virtual platform.