Director Kevin McDonald started his career with documentaries like One Day in September and Touching the Void before moving on to narrative films like The Last King of Scotland and State of Play. He's already returned to his roots with Life in a Day, the crowdsourced "YouTube movie" that premiered last week at Sundance, and now he's already got another documentary project up his sleeve. According to Deadline he's working on Marley, a film about the famous reggae singer Bob Marley made in full cooperation with his family.
The Bob Marley story has gone through a lot of screen attempts in recent years, with Martin Scorsese at one point on board to make what looks like this same family-authorized documentary, then the Weinstein Company was going to produce a film with the help of Marley's widow Rita. The last effort to make the news was an unauthorized documentary that would focus on Marley's affair with a former Miss Universe contestant. You can pretty safely assume the MacDonald one will have an entirely different focus.
Clearly the Marley story is tricky to tell and requires checking with a lot of people, but I imagine a filmmaker as talented as MacDonald can find a way to make the film in a way that both makes the family happy and tells us more than we already know about the famed reggae musician. The producers have set the film for a fall 2011 release, though there's no word on a distributor just yet.
