Ones to watch in 2026: Felipe Bustos Sierra, filmmaker

He proceeded to make videos of his grandparents’ house. He also interviewed his dad’s friends. “They were all meant to be journalists and do quite well, but one was running an arcade out of a garage and I remember thinking, 'My dad’s going to feel sad seeing this. How can I show him that his pal is doing the best he can?'

“I think there was a sense then of, 'I’ve got this camera; what can I do with it?’”

Bustos Sierra is telling me this on a break from readying his new documentary, Everybody to Kenmure Street, for its world premiere later this month at the Sundance Film Festival. As it happens, we’re meeting in a cafe in Glasgow’s Film City production facilities on the day the Sundance premiere is announced. “It’s a big year for Scottish films,” he says, referring to the fact that four other Scottish-backed projects have also made the cut.

But he’s buzzing too because his own interest in filmmaking as a kid coincided with the independent film explosion of the 1990s, a period when the late Robert Redford’s film festival became a beacon for DIY filmmaking. “People like Kevin Smith and Robert Rodriguez made indie filmmaking available to people who were not well-connected or well-resourced, so the fact they took us, when all these people had come through Sundance, is quite amazing.”

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As a self-taught filmmaker who’s been based in Scotland for the last 20 years – he came for the Edinburgh International Film Festival and never really left – that DIY spirt has been central to his filmmaking approach since he picked up that camera when he was nine. But it’s also at the heart of what he makes films about: ordinary people standing up for what’s right instead of waiting for the authorities to act.

His BAFTA Scotland-winning debut feature Nae Pasaran, for instance, drew on his own heritage to tell the incredible true story of the East Kilbride factory workers who showed solidarity with the people of Chile by refusing to work on the engines powering the Hawker Hunter planes used to overthrow Salvador Allende’s democratically elected government in 1973 – a small act of impromptu defiance that had significant ripple effects halfway across the world.

Everybody to Kenmure Street zeroes in on an even more turbo-charged act of spontaneous DIY protest. Executive-produced by Emma Thompson, it revisits the events of 13 May 2021, when hundreds of people congregated in the titular street in Glasgow’s Southside and successfully prevented the Home Office from removing two members of the local community who’d been rounded up in a morning raid on the first day of Eid in one of the most culturally diverse areas of the city.

The men in question were going through the asylum process and, says Bustos Sierra, should never have been bundled into the back of a van. And yet, despite the heavy police presence and the tense eight-hour standoff that followed, the day ended peacefully, with the police standing down and the men released – something almost unheard of in the long history of activism and protest.

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“I’m in my 40s, and throughout the whole thing for Chile when I was a kid” [he was exposed to a lot of the Solidarity Movement while growing up in Belgium] “I never got to feel this feeling of getting exactly what you want. And this wasn’t even within a month or a year, it was within a day. It’s just absolutely unique.”

That said, he’s still a bit heartbroken about not being there himself. Though he only lives ten minutes from Kenmure Street he remembers thinking, “This is gonna go to shit.” The heavy-handed police response to the Sarah Everard vigils a couple of months earlier and the crackdowns on the Black Lives Matter movement had added to his general despondency that things were in a “dark spot” – and it didn’t help either that a project he’d been working on had recently fallen apart in tragic circumstances.

“I didn’t see the hope,” he says, “and I was proven wrong.”

That realisation, however, was one of the reasons he knew immediately that he had to make a film about it. He started the next day, reaching out to Glasgow-based producer Ciara Barry and beginning the long process of piecing together what happened by talking to participants for months on end.

The resulting film, which is coming out ahead of the fifth anniversary of the protest, has been constructed from hours of first-person testimony and lots of phone footage and news footage. The aim, says Bustos Sierra, was to make something as sensory as possible that shows all the patterns and turning points and connects all the little pockets of what people did on the day, whether that was just bearing witness or taking a more active role.

But it also contextualises the protest within the wider history of direct action in the city. “I think all these people absorbed all the information in our recent history and decided the next step is not to just protect themselves more, but maybe take another step out and maybe protect somebody else. I mean, that was beautiful. I found that out in the first week, and at that point I was like, I don't really care what happens next, I'm gonna find a way to document this.”

Everybody to Kenmure Street will receive its UK premiere as the opening night film of the Glasgow Film Festival on 26 February and will go on general release in UK and Irish cinemas on 13 March

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