If you see one documentary this year, make it Searching for Sugar Man. Heck, if you see one film this year, make it Searching for Sugar Man.
Discovered in a Detroit bar in the late 1960s, Sixto Rodriguez worked with some of the biggest names in music (who viewed him as a Chicano Bob Dylan) to record the album Cold Fact, which never took off in the United States. On the other side of the world, however, in Apartheid-governed South Africa, young liberals found solace and comfort in his political lyrics. Without ever knowing it, Rodriguez became the folk hero of an entire generation – and influenced those who came after.
The oppressive regime in South Africa meant that the media seldom mentioned the work of “activist” musicians, and the world’s reaction, which included a cultural boycott imposed on the nation, meant that international music acts never toured there (when Paul Simon broke the ban to tour there with Ladysmith Black Mombazo following the 1986 release of Gracelands, it caused an international outcry).
In the midst of this information blackout, rumours abounded as to what had become of Rodriguez – the most common telling of a gruesome onstage suicide. In the 1990s, after the demise of Apartheid, record store owner Stephen Segerman and journalist Craig Bartholomew met by chance and decided to find out once and for all what had truly become of the enigmatic folk balladeer who had so inspired them and their peers. The truth they discovered was far more surprising than any of the rumours could ever have been…
Searching for Sugar Man is a true story that could only ever have happened under a very special set of circumstances. The necessary ingredients: a gentle giant whose music didn’t sell in the States, a dictatorial political system that kept its citizens in the dark and conscripted its young men into an army that spawned a cultural underground network, two very curious musical detectives and a mammoth dose of meant-to-be.
Director Malik Bendjelloul’s labour of love has paid off. Searching for Sugar Man is a beautiful film, told with gentleness and humour, filmed (by Camilla Skagerström) with an eye for scenery and scored with Rodriguez’s extraordinary music.
The editing alone, which Bendjelloul accomplished at his kitchen table, must have been a Herculean task, for how does one tell so complex a story, with so many threads, u-turns and near-dead-ends, in such a way that it flows into a seamless narrative that anyone could follow? Yet he achieves it, interspersing interviews with the key players and tracks from the albums (Cold Fact and Coming from Reality) with exquisite animation sequences that complement the rest of the film perfectly.
There are purportedly plans in the works for a feature film based on this story, but whether or not such a project could work remains to be seen. You couldn’t make this stuff up, because if it weren’t 100% true, no one would buy it for a second.
See this film. Buy the records. Find Sugar Man.
Searching for Sugar Man is out in UK cinemas on 27 July. If you can’t wait that long for more, read our feature and an exclusive interview with “the Indiana Jones of music”, Stephen Segerman.
