Searching for Sugar Man is a Swedish-British documentary … which details the efforts of two Cape Town fans in the late 1990s … to find out whether the rumored death of American musician Sixto Rodriguez was true, and, if not, to discover what had become of him.
Rodriguez’s music, which never took off in the United States, had become wildly popular in South Africa, but little was known about him there.
On 10 February 2013, the film won the BAFTA Award for Best Documentary at the 66th British Academy Film Awards in London, and two weeks later it won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature …
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
Loved it.
Sixto Rodriguez truly can be listed with the best of singer songwriters of his day. Sadly the career was far too short.
He’s spent most of his life in the same house in Detroit working as a labourer.
If you want to hear his music, look for the 2012 soundtrack album of Searching for Sugar Man. It’s a “best of”.
The essential postscript to the documentary is that he was wildly popular in Australia, as well.
Rick McCharles 