A couple of times a year, a
documentary feature will break through from the restraints of modern,
multiplex, big budget cinema and find a way onto our screens. Generally though,
because of availability, documentaries find a home on DVD and this is the
medium in which I saw Searching for Sugar
Man, the latest documentary to win an Oscar. It was precisely lack of
availability which meant I had to wait so long to see the film but now I have,
I can join in with the many who rate it so highly. Directed by first timer
Malik Bendjelloul and produced by Simon Chinn, the producer of the heart-pounding
Man on Wire, Searching for Sugar Man is a seemingly implausible tale of the
search for a forgotten musician.
Sixto Rodriguez was a man who released
two folk-rock albums in the early 1970s and then disappeared. The albums bombed
in the US
and Rodriguez’s label estimated, somewhat mean spiritedly, that his records
sold around six copies. The rumour was that the singer had committed suicide on
stage after the failure of his music career but what he could have never known
was that he was huge in Apartheid era South Africa. Although the South
Africans knew little to nothing about the singer, to them he was as popular as
Elvis or The Beatles and a South African journalist set out in the mid 1990s to
discover what exactly did happen to the mysterious singer.
