Reviewed on 28th February at the 2026 Dublin International Film Festival
Genre: Documentary
Director: Felipe Bustos Sierra
In Irish Cinemas: 13th March 2026
Felipe Bustos Sierra’s documentary about the dramatic events on Glasgow’s Kenmure Street in May 2021 is as much a chronicle of grassroots resistance as it is a testament to the possibilities of activist filmmaking. What might easily have been another grim entry in the UK’s long and contentious immigration story instead becomes, in Bustos Sierra’s hands, a vivid portrait of a neighbourhood that refused to remain passive. At the same time, two of its residents were taken away.
The backdrop to the incident lies in the immigration overhaul proposed earlier that year by then Home Secretary Priti Patel. Her Conservative government’s much-trumpeted “New Plan for Immigration” promised tougher enforcement and faster removals. Yet the reality of that policy crystallised in a far more chaotic and human form when, without warning, immigration officers appeared on Kenmure Street and detained two Sikh men from their home. The arrest was the opening step in a deportation process, but it quickly became something else entirely.
Word travelled fast. Within minutes, neighbours began to gather outside the property, initially uncertain but increasingly determined. Soon, the crowd thickened, bolstered by messages circulating across social media. What followed was an extraordinary eight-hour standoff that turned a quiet residential street into the unlikely stage for a civic confrontation. At its most dramatic moment, one protester slid beneath the Home Office van itself, physically preventing it from driving away with the detainees inside.
Bustos Sierra reconstructs the day through an inventive collage of perspectives. The film opens with a flurry of split-screen imagery: mobile phone footage, livestreams and hastily uploaded clips that captured the moment in real time as the protest spread online. These fragments recreate the sense of urgency and confusion that defined the gathering. Interwoven with them are later-recorded reflective interviews, allowing participants to revisit their memories with the clarity of hindsight.
Another unexpected device gives the film a slightly theatrical dimension. The testimony of the man who placed himself beneath the van is delivered in voiceover by Emma Thompson, one of the film’s executive producers, who appears lying horizontally as she recites his words. It’s a stylised touch that might sound eccentric on paper but serves to underline the physical vulnerability of that particular act of protest.
Kenmure Street itself is presented as a site steeped in historical contradictions. Bustos Sierra reminds us that the street’s name traces back to an aristocratic family whose wealth was built on profits from Jamaican slave plantations that ultimately fed into the machinery of the Scottish industrial revolution. The film quietly suggests that the confrontation unfolding there in 2021 echoes older struggles over power, labour and belonging. Glasgow’s tradition of organised resistance also surfaces in the crowd. Among those documenting the scene was Eileen Reid, daughter of the legendary 1970s trade union figure Jimmy Reid, reinforcing the sense that the city’s political memory is never far from the present.
What gives the documentary its emotional charge is the way the protest feels both spontaneous and communal. Residents hang handmade banners from their windows as the crowd swells. Food appears in pizza boxes circulating through the throng like improvised provisions for a siege. There is noise, humour and moments of anxiety, but above all a shared conviction that the deportation should not proceed.
On the opposing side stands the faceless machinery of the state. The immigration officers represent the UK Home Office, an institution that, in the film, appears distant and opaque. Police Scotland only enters the scene later, and even their presence carries a subtle political complexity: they answer not to Westminster but to the devolved government led by the Scottish National Party. It is a reminder that immigration enforcement sits awkwardly within the UK’s layered political structure.
The confrontation also unfolds in the lingering shadow of the pandemic. Masks cover the faces of officers and protesters alike, lending the images an oddly clinical atmosphere. The police appear unarmed, their protective gear emphasising public-health caution rather than force. Bustos Sierra leaves unspoken the question of whether more heavily equipped units might have been waiting out of sight, but the optics remain striking: a crowd of residents facing a state apparatus that seems simultaneously powerful and strangely distant.
Ultimately, the day ends not with violence but with negotiation. The well-known lawyer and campaigner Aamer Anwar arrives to help broker a resolution. When the two detained men are eventually released, Anwar addresses the crowd through a megaphone, delivering a triumphant speech about the power of collective action and the bonds that tie communities together. His final remark, reminding supporters about an upcoming demonstration for Palestine, broadens the moment beyond a single street in Glasgow, linking it to a wider culture of political solidarity.
Bustos Sierra’s film captures a fleeting yet potent episode in contemporary Britain: a day when an ordinary neighbourhood briefly halted the machinery of immigration enforcement. As a piece of documentary storytelling, it is energetic and inventive, but its deeper achievement lies in showing how quickly a local act of resistance can gather momentum and meaning. What happened on Kenmure Street becomes, in this telling, not simply a protest but a reminder that civic intervention, messy, improvised and human, still has the power to disrupt the systems that govern our lives.
Overall: 9/10
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