{"id":882696,"date":"2026-10-15T02:48:14","date_gmt":"2026-10-15T02:48:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/882696\/"},"modified":"2026-10-15T02:48:14","modified_gmt":"2026-10-15T02:48:14","slug":"everybody-to-kenmure-streets-director-on-foiled-immigration-raid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/882696\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Everybody To Kenmure Street’s Director On Foiled Immigration Raid"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tEverybody to Kenmure Street\u2019s bid for Oscar recognition is gaining traction. The film directed by Felipe Bustos Sierra earned a spot on the influential DOC NYC short list<\/a> of the year\u2019s best documentaries announced on Wednesday. And on Tuesday, the film from executive producer Emma Thompson earned four nominations for the Critics Choice Documentary Awards<\/a>, including Best Documentary Feature and Best Director.<\/p>\n

\n\tBustos Sierra\u2019s film captures a remarkable event that took place in Glasgow, Scotland on May 13, 2021. Early that morning, immigration enforcement agents from the Home Office attempted to grab two Sikh men in a dawn raid but when locals became aware of what was going on they intervened, leading to an extraordinary standoff between law enforcement and members of the community in and around Kenmure Street.<\/p>\n

\n\tUniformed officers probably were unaware of the history of that neighborhood and of Glasgow as a whole and how residents there view immigrants.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"'Everybody<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\u2018Everybody to Kenmure Street\u2019<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tIcarus Films<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThis is a welcoming place\u2026 The south side of Glasgow has been a landing space for immigrants for centuries, since it was created really, [with] working class and immigrants living together,\u201d the filmmaker said after a screening of the film as part of Deadline\u2019s For the Love of Docs event series. \u201cGlasgow has always been seen as a bit of a rebel city\u2026 And that history obviously permeates that neighborhood.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe first person to try to disrupt the attempted immigration raid came to be known as \u201cVan Man.\u201d That individual climbed under the immigration vehicle in which the detainees were being held and latched onto the rear axle. Eventually, as word spread, hundreds of people poured into the street, many recording the events with their cell phone cameras. It became an enormous undertaking for Bustos Sierra and his editor Colin Monie to synchronize all that footage.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Director<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tDirector Felipe Bustos Sierra<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tIcarus Films<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt was the hardest part of making this film,\u201d Bustos Sierra conceded. \u201cThe entire protest is shown\u2026 through what people had at hand on the day. We were lucky that two people who lived on the street were professional cameramen and they started filming on the smartphones, but\u2026 they went back, got their 4K cameras and managed to capture the second half of the day. But most of it is smartphone cameras and some really bad, some really old ones too.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHe added that some of the video came from activists who had scrubbed the metadata, \u201cwhich made it really difficult to create an accurate timeline, which we eventually got to, but that was months of work.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"EP<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tEP Emma Thompson<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tNick Haddow<\/p>\n

\n\tEmma Thompson not only executive produced the film, but she stars in it, in a manner of speaking \u2014 playing Van Man. That inventive choice came about after the real van man (who preferred to remain anonymous) said his words from interviews with the director could be used in the film, but he didn\u2019t want to appear in it himself.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cLuckily, I had kept a light correspondence with Emma Thompson after my first film came out about Chile, a country that she has also a strong connection with,\u201d Bustos Sierra explained. \u201cAnd so, when Van Man told me didn\u2019t want to be in it\u2026 you think, \u2018What do I have?\u2019 \u2026And I just pictured Emma Thompson going out there and saying, \u2018Hey, I\u2019m Van Man.\u2019 It made me laugh like maybe what Van Man did [for] the protest, Emma will do for our film.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe dramatized sequence, shot in London, involved Thompson climbing onto a rig beneath a van. She was wedged in there like the real guy in Glasgow.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe did build the rig. We did put her under underneath the van. When she did arrive, she looked at the rig, looked at me and [cinematographer] Kirsten [McMahon] and say, \u2018This is the strangest thing anyone\u2019s ever asked me to do.\u2019 \u2026I think she made the discomfort part of her performance. And so, it worked really well.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBustos Sierra sees what the people around Kenmure Street did that day as \u201csmall revolutionary acts.\u201d He describes their attitude as, \u201cYou don\u2019t remove [these men] without valid cause as this was happening. There\u2019s absolutely nothing illegal [done] by these two guys. These are our neighbors and we\u2019re just going to stand for our community.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWatch the full conversation in the video above.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t<\/a><\/p>\n

\n\tFor The Love of Docs is produced with the long-time support of National Geographic Documentary Films<\/a>. Films are presented free of charge to the audience and to the filmmakers. The series continues with weekly screenings, followed by conversations with filmmakers through December 1. Join us next week for Seized, directed by Sharon Liese, the story of a police raid on a small-town newspaper in Kansas that triggered a national uproar. To RSVP for the screening, click here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Everybody to Kenmure Street\u2019s bid for Oscar recognition is gaining traction. The film directed by Felipe Bustos Sierra…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":882697,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[38548,88,202350,229728,115084,370633,229729,206],"class_list":["post-882696","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-emma-thompson","tag-entertainment","tag-everybody-to-kenmure-street","tag-felipe-bustos-sierra","tag-for-the-love-of-docs","tag-ftlod","tag-icarus-films","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/882696","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=882696"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/882696\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/882697"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=882696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=882696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=882696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}