Marvin The Movie gets its big screen premiere

Walking into Cinema One at the Watershed on a rainy Saturday afternoon carrying a yellow football and accompanied by his wife and young children, Marvin Rees made an understated entrance to the world premiere of a feature length documentary about his journey to becoming the first ever mayor of black African-Caribbean descent to lead a European city.

Covering the time from when Rees first stood as a candidate and finished second in the 2012 mayoral election, to his political rejuvenation and subsequent victory in 2016, The Mayor’s Race was shot over a period of five years by director Loraine Blumenthal, who traveled back and forth from her home in Germany to complete the film.

“It’s a really odd thing looking in on yourself,” Rees told the audience at a Q&A after the 80-minute film. “It’s emotional. You’re engaging with the emotional moments in the journey. It was kind of an out-of-body experience.”

Rees is shown in the film as a family man, an action man sparring in a boxing ring, a philosopher, a churchgoer and a politician who tells former mayor George Ferguson to mind his language when saying “bollocks” at a hustings.

The Mayor’s Race began as an unreleased documentary, After The Dream, following Rees’ failed attempt to win in 2012, made by Blumenthal and producer Rob Mitchell who met while working on a community project inspired by the Bristol bus boycott story.

Repackaged after his victory to the top job in 2016, the film’s marketing blurb asks: “Marvin Rees wants to run for mayor. Does it matter that he’s black or from the ‘wrong’ side of town?”

Blumenthal’s film, similar to Bunch of Kunst in its style, level of access and time it took to complete, also positions Rees in Bristol’s historical context, with archive footage of the 1980 St Paul’s riots, and Rees talking to Bristol’s bus boycott figurehead Paul Stephenson.

Black leadership and its challenges was the topic of a panel discussion before the film.

Recalling the Bristol that he called home when an undergraduate at the University of Bristol in the early 1970s, Paul Boateng, former Labour cabinet minister and now a member of the House of Lords, said that the city then “was not owning up to its past”.

He said: “The notion of having a black mayor was impossible to think of.”

The very title of the film gives a clue to one of its themes, but this is not a documentary that overtly concentrates on the ethnicity of Rees (whose dad was born in Jamaica), rather it is that classic tale of a journey, with Rees swapping a hoodie and running shoes for a shirt and tie.

The film features archive footage of Rees growing up in Bristol

Many people in the audience recognised themselves on the big screen in a film showing “the metamorphosis of a man” as described by Ujima Radio chair Roger Griffith who hosted the Q&A after the premiere; “a film about not giving up” according to its director Blumenthal; and a movie presenting Rees as “the embodiment of tenacity” according to one man in the audience.

Rees’ wife, Kirsten, a pilates instructor and wellbeing coach, admits in the film that she thinks her husband was not ready to win in 2012 but that his subsequent victory was “awesome”.

“It has been amazing to watch him grow,” she says to the camera.

Levi, one of Rees’ three children, joined his dad on stage for the Q&A following the film’s premiere

Reciting a poem about his 45-year-old friend at the end of the panel discussion prior to the premiere, Bristol poet laureate Miles Chambers called Rees a man of “golden mixed race birth”, with “charm and vigour and righteous might”.

The Watershed audience didn’t just clap at the end of the film; some clapped at moments within it such as when Rees finally achieved his dream of becoming mayor.

The Mayor’s Race producer Rob Mitchell is now looking for a distributor so the film might receive a theatrical release or be shown on terrestrial television.

Rees is travelling to Washington DC on Monday to meet with other global mayors to raise both Bristol’s and his own profile on the world stage.

At the Q&A following the film, questions from the audience were asked to focus on the documentary but some inevitably turned to politics.

So, apart from his starring role on the silver screen, what will Marvin’s legacy be? “I’ve got to build some houses first,” Rees said with a smile.