Searching for Sugar Man is a 2012 documentary film, written and directed by Malik Bendjelloul, which details the efforts in the late 1990s of two Cape Town fans, Stephen "Sugar" Segerman and Craig Bartholomew Strydom, to find out whether the rumoured death of 1970s Mexican-American musician Sixto Rodriguez was true and, if not, to learn what had become of him. Rodriguez's music, which had never achieved success in his home country of the United States, had become very popular in South Africa, although little was known about him there.
While he initially used Super 8 film to record some stylised shots for the film, director Malik Bendjelloul ran out of money for more film to record the final few shots. After three years of cutting-room work, the main financial backers of the film threatened to withdraw funding to finish it. Bendjelloul resorted to filming the remaining stylised shots on his smartphone using an iPhoneapp called 8mm Vintage Camera.
Release
Searching for Sugar Man was the opening film at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2012, where it won the Special Jury Prize and the Audience Award for best international documentary. It was released in the United Kingdom on 26 July 2012, and had a limited release (New York and Los Angeles) in the United States the following day.
The film performed well during its theatrical release, earning $3,696,196 at the US box office (82nd of all US docs on Box Office Mojo).
Reception
Critical response
Searching for Sugar Man received widespread critical acclaim. On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, it has a 95% approval rating based on reviews from 133 critics, with an average score of 8.0/10; the site's "critics consensus" reads: "A fascinating portrait of a forgotten musical pioneer, Searching for Sugar Man is by turns informative and mysterious." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 79 out of 100 based on 32 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film a glowing four-star review, writing "I hope you're able to see this film...and yes, it exists because we need for it to." The New York Times critic Manohla Dargis also wrote a positive review, calling the film "a hugely appealing documentary about fans, faith and an enigmatic Age of Aquarius musician who burned bright and hopeful before disappearing." Dargis subsequently named Searching for Sugar Man one of the 10 best films of 2012.
Criticism
The film omits that Rodriguez was successful in Australia in the 1970s and toured there in 1979 and 1981. Because of this omission, some critics have accused it of engaging in "myth-making". However, the film focuses on Rodriguez's mysterious reputation in South Africa and the attempts of music historians there to track him down in the mid-1990s. South Africans were unaware of his Australian success due to the harsh censorship enacted by the apartheid regime,[failed verification] coupled with international sanctions that made any communication with the outside world on the subject of banned artists virtually impossible.
However, Rodriguez's music was never actually censored or banned in apartheid-era South Africa. A 2021 study revealed that the film's scene in the Archive of Censored Material was entirely staged; no such place exists and the footage was instead shot among random stacks in a university library. The supposedly censored version of Rodriguez's Cold Fact album retrieved from the shelf with scratched-up grooves and a hand-written "avoid" caution was actually a used copy that the director had acquired himself and defaced for the purposes of the scene. While a South African Broadcasting Corporation document shown in the film does indicate a radio ban of the song "Sugar Man," it actually dates from the release of the CD edition in the 1990s; specifically, the song was rejected by radio censors for its drug content in early 1993, three years after the release of Nelson Mandela. As the author of the 2021 study concludes: "Paradoxically, in implementing his narrative Bendjelloul ends up mimicking the very apartheid state he claims Rodriguez assisted in dismantling. He wanted to uphold the idea of Rodriguez as anti-apartheid icon within South Africa, and to do this he obscured the truth availed to him during his research with his respondents and instead staged
reenactments that portrayed his fiction rather than the reality."
Awards and nominations
Searching for Sugar Man won the award for Best Documentary at the 85th Academy Awards. Rodriguez declined to attend the awards ceremony, as he did not want to overshadow the filmmakers' achievement. Upon accepting the award, producer Simon Chinn remarked on this generosity, saying: "That just about says everything about that man and his story that you want to know." Malik Bendjelloul said on stage: "Thanks to one of the greatest singers ever, Rodriguez."
At the Doha Tribeca Film Festival (DTFF), Searching for Sugar Man shared the "Best of the Fest" audience award with the Chinese feature film Full Circle and was awarded $50,000 (US).
The film won Best Film at the In-Edit Festival in Santiago de Chile.
Searching for Sugar Man was nominated for five awards at the 6th Annual Cinema Eye Honors for Nonfiction Filmmaking, tying with The Imposter for the most nominations. Winners were announced on 9 January 2013 at New York City's Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens:
Nonfiction Feature Filmmaking—Malik Bendjelloul and Simon Chinn
Production—Simon Chinn
Graphic Design and Animation—Oskar Gullstrand, Arvid Steen (won)
The film's soundtrack is a compilation of songs from Rodriguez's two studio albums, as well as three tracks from his unfinished third album. It reached No. 3 in Sweden in early 2013 when the Academy Award nomination was announced, and had been in the charts for 26 weeks by the time it received the award in February 2013. In Denmark, the soundtrack reached No. 18, and in New Zealand it reached No. 24.
