It was early in the morning of May 13, 2021. The place was the neighborhood of Pollokshields, Glasgow, Scotland. The street was Kemure.
The UK Immigration Enforcement, under the control of the Home Secretary Priti Patel (notorious Thatcherite who among other things approved the extradition of Julian Assange to the United States), had conducted an early morning raid and arrested two immigrant men. They were placed in a van, which was about to take them away.
But then something happened.
People began to gather. They came out of their houses and from the local mosque. One man slid under the van and grabbed hold of the axle. As a crowd began to form the word went out “Everybody to Kenmure Street!” What followed was an hours long standoff between the Immigration forces, the local police, and a crowd of neighborhood residents that eventually numbered in the thousands. This film is a documentary about the events of the day.
Assembled from video shot on phones and with other devices that day, interviews with some of the neighbors involved, and historic archival footage, this is a retelling, event by event, of that fateful day, which also happened to be Eid, one of two main festivals in Islam. Many of the residents of Kenmure Street are Pakistani immigrants or the children of immigrants.
Felipe Bustos Sierra (“Nae Pasaran”) and his team have done an excellent job of taking many different sources of video and assembling a coherent narrative of the events. One of the more interesting tools they used, when an important figure from the event was unavailable, was to have an actor stand in but announce: “These are my words but this is not my face.”
For example, the “Van Man” whose presence under the immigration authority van prevented it from leaving Kenmure Street had had his words recorded at the time, but when the doc was made, an actress (Emma Thompson) under a vehicle with bits of the crowd visible around the vehicle spoke those words on camera. An off-duty nurse (Kate Dickie) who kept a watchful eye on the “Van Man” was another.
Another interesting approach, employed at the beginning of the doc, was a collage of early 20th century through early 21st century film that set the stage by showing what Glasgow was like, and that it has a long history of resistance to forces inimical to its inhabitants. This collage runs a full six and one quarter minutes, and is echoed throughout the film by statements of the day’s participants affirming that these seized men were part of their community, and they were not going to allow the government to step in and take them without a fight.
Among the many participants interviewed for the doc, and present in the footage from the event, is Aamer Anwar, a civil rights lawyer who on that day negotiated an end to the eight hour standoff between the police and the neighborhood, avoiding bloodshed, the arrest of the seized immigrants, and the “Van Man” who’d used his body to stop the van in the first place. His impassioned speech to the crowd is one of the highlights of this excellent documentary.
This film is an important reminder that ordinary people can stand up to the forces of aggression within our own countries, cities, and neighborhoods – and win.
Runtime: One hour, 39 minutes
Availability: Community screenings, Apple TV, Prime Video
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