Last week, I had the opportunity to watch Everybody to Kenmure Street at Dundee Contemporary Arts, followed by a question-and-answer session with the director Felipe Bustos Sierra. It covers the story of a Glasgow man who clung to the underside of an Immigration Enforcement van in May 2021 and the neighbours who rallied around him.
Rather than rehashing the message of the film, which has been done many times, let’s focus instead on its composition.
Like many documentaries, the majority of the narrative is pieced together through eyewitness footage and interviews. This provides a sense of immediacy, while making it cheap to produce. However, there are a few sequences read by actors, Emma Thompson among them. The director later explained these were either to maintain anonymity or for legal reasons.
But this technique also brings its own problems. A performer reading from a script will invariably personalise it to one degree or another, whether by tone of voice, word emphasis, or even the speed of delivery. I don’t know for sure how these sequences were filmed, but I suspect the real people were interviewed and their words were ‘parroted’ by the actors.
Scottish cinema as a whole seems to be having a moment in the sun right now, and this recent batch seems to be following a documentary-to-drama pipeline.
Let’s compare the recent I Swear, exploring the life of John Davidson and the effects of his Tourette’s syndrome. Although he’s been the subject of a few documentaries, this was the first time it was approached as a drama, spanning his childhood and adulthood.
Then just last week, James McAvoy attended the premiere of his California Schemin’, about a Scottish duo who pretended to be American so they would be taken more seriously. This story was first told in the documentary The Great Hip Hop Hoax, and features much of their own archive footage. I look forward to seeing how the dramatisation works out.
Gavin Cameron 