Everybody To Kenmure Street (2026) ‘Sundance’ Documentary Review: An Invigorating Look at the Power of Community in our Hyper-Individualized World

Last year’s New York City mayoral election saw a brown candidate winning the race against political heavyweights despite a shocking lack of support from his own party. Before the elections, as people started realizing the likelihood of his win, they began spewing hatred, backed by their racist, Islamophobic agendas. Some of them stooped so low that they brought his eating habits into focus. Similar conservative crusades have started showing their heads in a few other countries, where immigrants are bearing the brunt of this venom, especially if they aren’t caucassian. It all seems relevant in the real-life narrative that we witness in Felipe Bustos Sierra’s documentary, “Everybody To Kenmure Street” (2026).

Bustos Sierra takes us through the 2021 protest that happened in Kenmure Street, Pollokshields. The reason behind the protest was the detainment of two Sikh men on the dawn of Eid in a neighbourhood known for its cultural diversity. The day was supposed to be one of joy and celebration, where people would come together for their festivities as in any other religion. Instead, it became one of terror spread by local authorities. Their detainment would have gone unnoticed if not for a tenant who decided to take action in a way possible to him.

The said tenant crawled under the immigration enforcement department’s van, which was supposed to take the two men away. Later came to be known as the ‘van man,’ the person stayed there until the men were let go from the van. Unfortunately, it took the authorities nearly eight hours to release them.

Until then, local community members and activists gathered on the street, joining one after another, until it became a sit-in protest that filled the street to the brim. Some might imagine that the people who gathered there were only from the diaspora, but plenty of them were white, as you can see in the footage in Bustos Sierra’s documentary.

The issue wasn’t only the detainment of people, but the level of overreaction from the authorities without having a proper conversation with the people, who were hoping for peaceful justice. Instead of understanding the gravity of the situation, the police kept trying to find a way out of the crowd.

The way in which the two men were taken from their home and would have vanished without anyone’s notice sounds nightmarish, as horrifying as the narratives frequently spun against people from developing countries. Fortunately, the situation was resolved a few hours later, but mainly because of the support people showed each other.

That’s another fascinating aspect about this protest. People stayed there because it’s the humane thing to do. There’s a moment in the doc, featuring an audio recording with one of the detainees, where an officer asks whether he holds a special place within the community, as if that’s the only motive for people to stand by each other’s side. Bustos Sierra effectively conveys the power of community through a collection of footage from this fateful day in 2021. The videos, captured from different vantage points, offer a personal account of this affair, making viewers feel like they are part of this crowd as well.

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The director also includes some reenactments of this incident, featuring iconic actors like Emma Thompson and Kate Dickie. In between, he includes some old clips that offer a glimpse into the country’s past, Glasgow’s in particular, including its paradoxical history of women’s rights and workers’ rights movements on the land built off the labor of African enslaved people.

He pairs it with testimonies from local community members, who clue us in on specifics of the protest and its connection to the city’s history, where Nelson Mandela once paid a visit. Some testimonies also reveal details about an important ruling, thanks to a protester and her friends, who rescued their schoolmates from detainment.

It all goes to show the strength of collective action and willingness to stand on the right, humane side of history, even in a world losing its humanity. While race is one of the factors behind inhumane policies, so is class and caste, including the voices within the South Asian community fuelling the harmful agenda of Western conservatives. More recently, a brown comedian who appeared in a queer rom-com claimed support for the venomous far-right movement in the States, after building a career out of using stereotypes about her own community to gain laughs from Western audiences.

Besides her, there are many wealthy, upper-caste brown people who, in a bid for a seat at the bigger table, are promoting the barbaric conservative agendas, while, directly or indirectly, legitimising their harmful cause.  It is also relevant in the case of Kenmure Street because the recent changes in the UK’s immigration policies are spearheaded by people with similar cultural roots.

Bustos Sierra’s documentary introduces parallels between racially motivated crimes across the world, but the film isn’t vastly insightful in the present-day political context, even about the country’s current policies or the people pulling the strings of the inhumane operations. It could have offered a deeper understanding of debates about Scotland’s connection to the UK’s immigration policies.

Still, it presents a riveting portrait of this specific incident that may always be a part of the city’s cultural memory. The doc shows how people came together, many of them got to know each other for the first time, and celebrated Eid irrespective of their ethnic or cultural background. Therefore, Bustos Sierra may not have covered the possible scope of its narrative, but he certainly captures the emotion.

Felipe Bustos Sierra’s ‘Everybody To Kenmure Street’ is a part of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.

Everybody To Kenmure Street (2026) Documentary Links: IMDb, Letterboxd