This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
A documentary about a musician can treat religion as color, a fact mentioned once and left behind. Kevin Macdonald's 2012 film Marley does not take that route. Made with the cooperation of the Marley family and built from rare footage, interviews and performances, the 145 minute film traces Bob Marley's conversion to Rastafari as a real turning point in his life, not a lyrical flourish borrowed for effect.
The film gives real space to Mortimer Planno, the Rastafari preacher whose friendship and teaching shaped Marley's own understanding of the faith, including the belief, as the documentary presents it, that Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia is the returned Christ. It reaches back to illustrate this with genuine archival material, 1966 footage of Selassie's own visit to Jamaica, rather than narrating the belief in the abstract. From there the film traces a direct line into the music itself, showing how Rastafari conviction shaped songs including Exodus and Jah Live, work that a listener unfamiliar with the faith might otherwise hear only as reggae without knowing what specifically it is singing about.
Premiering at the Berlin International Film Festival in February 2012 before its general release that April, the film was built as what its own marketing called a definitive life story, and its treatment of Marley's religious conviction is a meaningful part of what earns that description, an attempt to show the belief driving the music rather than only the music the belief produced.