At dawn on Eid on 13 May 2021, the UK's Immigration Enforcement arrived on Kenmure Street in Glasgow and detained two Indian men. Word quickly spread through the diverse Pollokshields community, and their neighbours, of both local and South Asian heritage, came out onto the street to protect them. In Everybody to Kenmure Street, which has just world-premiered in the World Cinema Documentary Competition at Sundance, his second feature-length doc after the BAFTA Scotland Award-winning Nae Pasaran, Chilean-Belgian director Felipe Bustos Sierra creates an engaging, enlightening and inspiring account of this day that showed how the power of solidarity can at least win one battle against the UK Home Office's bullying anti-immigration policy.

The film opens with a montage of Glasgow's protest history, set to a cover of Lee Hazlewood's gentle but rousing “Your Sweet Love”, from the suffragettes, through the shipyard strikes, to the famous speeches of Jimmy Reid (whose own daughter was spotted on Kenmure Street that day), Thatcher-era trade-union demonstrations, Mandela's speech on the occasion of having a street named after him, and the 2005 Glasgow Girls anti-dawn raid campaign. When the film starts proper, it builds slowly, at first showing an empty street and interspersing scenes from an increasing number of smartphones and camera footage as the action builds up, with quickly cut, warm talking-heads interviews with protesters of all racial and religious backgrounds. Starting from just a few people who came to sit down around the van in which the two men were being detained, by the end of the day, the gathering had grown to several thousand.

Even if this is not a film about individual heroes, but rather about spontaneous collective action, one man was instrumental in stopping the Immigration Enforcement from just taking off with their prisoners – the unnamed “Van Man” who slid under the vehicle and spent the day hanging from its axle, making it physically impossible for him to be removed. Enter executive producer Emma Thompson, who plays him in a spirited, uplifting re-enactment. Another acting star, Kate Dickie, speaking straight to the camera through the crack between the van and the asphalt, plays the nurse who was making sure he would be alright. As for the men in the van, we get a recollection from one of them, delivered in Punjabi, against a dark screen peppered with specks of dust, putting the viewer in his shoes.

Somewhere around the halfway mark, the film veers into Glasgow's apparent contradiction of a city priding itself on its modern anti-racist identity and its history as one of the centres of the UK's slavery trade, which drove its industrial growth.

The detailed proceedings are kept clear and engaging thanks to Colin Monie's editing, which builds them into an elaborate whole, mirroring the slow build-up of the protest. The multitude of footage from various cameras allows for several angles of the same moments to alternate or join together in split-screen sequences. The subtle electronic score by Barry Burns, of Glaswegian giants Mogwai, often kept quite low in Jack Coghill's sound design, adds just enough colour to complete the picture of how the community, eventually led by human rights lawyer Aamer Anwar, was able to stop the racist actions of Priti Patel's administration, which was unachievable even for the Scottish government.

Everybody to Kenmure Street is a co-production between the UK's Barry Crerar and Debasers Filums, in association with Al Jazeera Documentary. The Party Film Sales has the international rights.