MOVIE NEWS – The genre of films about the lives of musicians is booming, with successful and perhaps less successful opuses being made all the time. Freddy Mercury, Elton John, Elvis and even his daughter Priscilla have all been made into films, with Johnny Cash being a more recent addition.

Bob Marley: One Love, about reggae’s most famous artist, will be released soon, but the filmmakers have not set out to cover Marley’s entire career.

“We knew from the beginning that we didn’t want to tell a cradle-to-grave story,” director Reinaldo Marcus Green told Entertainment Weekly. “We’re focusing on a relatively short period of time, 1976-78, when the most important things in Bob’s life happened. It was the time when he was at the height of his creativity, the time when his native Jamaica was at its hottest, and the time when he was diagnosed with the cancer that caused his death a few years later. He faced enormous challenges as a responsible man, father, husband and of course as a musician. We felt that this brief glimpse told us everything about who he was, as it was in these two or three years that we remembered him most. Of course, there are glimpses of his childhood and his early years, but we are not essentially concerned with what it was like to be born and how he died. We wanted to capture the message he left for posterity.”

Green and his team also set out to shed light on the social events of Jamaica at the time, because without that background, they believe, Marley’s songs cannot be understood. Jamaica in the late 1970s was in the throes of a political crisis and violence – Marley himself and his family were assassinated and miraculously survived. Shortly after the assassination, Marley’s famous One Love Peace Concert, at which he called for peace, is the climax of the film.

“We all know the music and we can dance to it, but we don’t understand what the songs are about,” Green continued. Our film shows the wider political context, so the viewer will not only hear the music, but understand it.”

(Bob Marley: One Love – domestic release: 22 February 2024)

Source: UIP Dunafilm