This is not a film about the making of an album, it is a film about an artist and his world: about the impact of the world on Bob Marley and of Bob Marley on the world.
Today, Marley’s image stands for freedom and resistance to oppression around the globe: from Nepal to Argentina, from Kazakhstan to the Maoris of New Zealand. His true peers are as much Che Guevara, Nelson Mandela, Muhammad Ali and Ghandi as they are Bob Dylan and the Beatles.
1977 was not only the year that punk broke in Britain, but also saw the release of Bob Marley’s most important recording “Exodus”. Time magazine voted this album the ‘Album of the Century’.
From “Exodus” and Marley’s legendary concert at the Rainbow in the summer of ’77, he took reggae music and the message of Rastafaria to a world that until then had been exposed to neither; a world still defined by the recent intensity of the Cold War.
Marley recorded the album in London where he had moved to in 1977 after being shot in Jamaica. While we hear the songs of the LP, we witness the dramatic events of year 1977 passing by. Through the brilliantly edited archive material, an unusual political music documentary film evolves.