Sundance ‘26: ‘EVERYBODY TO KENMURE’ Captures a City’s Peaceful Rebellion Against Detaining Immigrants

Archival footage reveals a city in flux, swelling amidst years of demonstrations and unrest across Glasgow, Ireland. History falls like dominoes through the flicker of old newscasts. Hope, growth, loss, and resistance all swirling in the streets. On Eid Mubarak 2021, the holiday marking the end of Ramadan, immigration enforcement shows up on Kenmure Street, a quiet corner of one of the city’s most diverse neighborhoods. Without warning, they seize two Muslim men, vanish them into a van, and prepare to drive off. But citizens appear. One man slides under the van, refusing to move. He forces a standoff. Peaceful protest erupts, spontaneously.

As an American, the visuals are familiar. But the police response is entirely alien. They’re calm. Polite. No drawn weapons, no barking orders, no threats of deadly force. Instead: water bottles and welfare checks. At least at first.

Soon, the crowd grows. People arrive with blankets, food, and warm clothes. Bicycles become barricades. Then come the sirens. Waves of police vans, one after another, thundering in to shut it all down. The protestors’ words—including the “van man” and a local nurse—are reenacted by English and Irish actors like Kate Dickie and Emma Thompson, offering both anonymity and a sense of theatrical reverence.

Everybody to Kenmure Street hits a nerve, especially for American viewers witnessing ICE raids that amount to racial profiling in real time. Our own masked agents, secretive and unaccountable, act with impunity. Murdering citizens like Renee Goode and Alex Pretti for “not submitting fast enough.” The U.S. is no longer flirting with fascism. They’re fully engaged now. In contrast, Ireland’s Kenmure Street moment feels almost quaint.

Don’t get it twisted. The civility doesn’t last, because it was never built to. At first, the police seem measured, maybe even courteous. But that’s with a handful of officers on the scene. As the vans multiply, so does the tension. The new arrivals bring a different posture: faces masked, tempers short, orders barked. What starts with water bottles ends with batons. The shift is stark. Protesters are dragged off in cuffs and stuffed into vans, and the illusion of restraint shatters.

Yet through all of this, there’s a current of communal care. Strangers sprint toward one another, toward the van, toward something good for its own sake. Spontaneous organization flares up. Wild. Urgent. Human. Police scramble to break it down, but the logic is flawed. As one person puts it: “There’s nothing more radicalizing than being hit with a baton.”

The film also traces Glasgow’s historical contradictions. Its deep entanglement with the profits of enslaved labor. The government payouts to former slave owners. The paradox of a proudly progressive city built atop human suffering. It weaves this historical rot into the present, showing how injustice calcifies in systems that reward it.

Directed by Felipe Bustos Sierra and edited by Colin Monie, this Irish documentary unearths a radical lineage of resistance and decency. It explores the fragility of democracy, the volatile privilege of protest, and what happens when a government creeps toward fascism. But above all, Everybody to Kenmure Street is a resounding reminder that the good of a nation’s citizens can outweigh the villainy of their governments.

CONCLUSION: ‘Everybody to Kenmure Street’ sees spontaneous civil disobedience break out on the streets of Glasgow circa 2021 as the police attempt to forcibly disappear alleged-immigrants. A story that’s tragically even more poignant today.