Felipe Bustos Sierra Takes Everybody To Kenmure Street

One of the best things about the Sundance Film Festival is the way it brings people from all over the world to one place for a shared experience. Everybody To Kenmure Street, the new documentary from director Felipe Bustos Sierra, is a story about people in Glasgow, Scotland, coming together for a reason that began as anything but celebratory. On the first day of the Muslim holiday of Eid in 2021, messages circulated through community networks that two local men were being put into a truck and detained for deportation. Almost instantly, hundreds of residents stepped away from work, family meals and daily routines to assemble on Kenmure Street, physically positioning themselves between the men and the authorities. What unfolded was a remarkable and largely unplanned moment of collective defiance that yielded surprising results.

“But sometimes activism has tangible impacts. It’s only because people turn up and do the right thing.”

“My father was a Chilean exile. He was a journalist who, for 15 years, was on the blacklist and wasn’t able to come back to Chile,” Bustos Sierra says. Growing up in the shadow of exile and organized resistance helped shape the Chilean-Belgian director into who he is today. Another defining moment came from the late great Rob Reiner. “I saw Stand By Me when I was 12, and it changed my life,” Bustos Sierra says. His debut feature, the documentary Nae Pasaran, was released in 2018. It tells the story of factory workers in East Kilbride, Scotland, who refused to service Chilean Air Force engine parts in protest of the human rights abuses committed under Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship between 1974 and 1978. Nae Pasaran won Best Film at the BAFTA Scotland Awards and marked Bustos Sierra as a filmmaker deeply engaged with stories of solidarity in practice. As he looks at the stories he’s telling, he emphasizes that political movements don’t just belong to the past; they pass knowledge forward. That sense of continuity is one reason Kenmure Street resonated so strongly with him. “I went there because I remember this,” Bustos Sierra says. “And I felt like I needed to do something similar.” 

Everybody To Kenmure Street reconstructs the events through the eyes of the people who were there: neighbors, passersby, parents, workers — many of them strangers. Despite the film’s political implications, and a U.S. premiere that comes in the wake of the murder of Renee Good by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, Bustos Sierra is careful about how he frames his work. “I think they are definitely films first,” he says. “But sometimes activism has tangible impacts. It’s only because people turn up and do the right thing.” The practical challenge was turning a chaotic, rapidly unfolding event into a coherent film. Bustos Sierra began the project during lockdown, making traditional production impossible. “The first six months were going through social media finding footage, reaching out to people,” he says. At the same time, he met participants for long walks, talking through what they saw and why they went to Kenmure Street. “I’ve been involved in solidarity campaigns most of my life, and yet I’ve never felt something like what the people on Kenmure Street felt,” Bustos Sierra says. Even seasoned activists were surprised by how quickly things shifted.

“I’ve been involved in solidarity campaigns most of my life, and yet I’ve never felt something like what the people on Kenmure Street felt.”

The filmmaking mirrored that improvisation. “So much of this film is made from fragments … clips are three, four, five seconds long,” Bustos Sierra says. Some of that energy came from unexpected sources. Two professional cameramen initially arrived with cell phones, then returned with 4K cameras when they realized what was happening. Their footage became central to the film, but Bustos Sierra stresses that resistance and documentation were among many roles people took on, as many people came by just to bring food and water to help sustain the crowd. 

Truth was crucial, particularly given the abundance of misinformation that has spread surrounding the protest. Aside from minimal establishing shots, the film relies almost entirely on footage captured by those present. Building trust took time and eventually extended to the protest’s most mythologized figure, the man known as Van Man, who stopped the deportation van by climbing underneath it and refusing to move. To protect his identity, Bustos Sierra  came up with a bold solution: asking Oscar and BAFTA winning actress Emma Thompson to step into the role, speaking his words verbatim from under a mockup of the van. Thompson, who had reached out to express her admiration for Nae Pasaran, agreed immediately and also served as an executive producer on the film.

“It’s amazing what she can bring to just a few moments in the film.”

Before Thompson joined, Bustos Sierra recorded the lines himself as a placeholder. When she performed them, the impact was immediate. “When she started doing it, I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is gonna be fucking great.’” She delivered the rest in one take. “It’s amazing what she can bring to just a few moments in the film,” he says.

Everybody To Kenmure Street is less about a single act than about what can be achieved by a unified front standing up to injustice. By showing how ordinary people organized themselves in real time to protect their neighbors, Bustos Sierra’s film insists that power is not abstract or distant. It is, as Kenmure Street demonstrated, already in the hands of those willing to show up — and who live by the ethos: I won’t be afraid, just as long as you stand by me.

Read more of SLUG’s coverage of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.