Searching for Sugar Man

Searching for Sugar Man is a documentary film directed by Malik Bendjelloul , which details the efforts of two Cape Town fans in the late 1990s, Stephen 'Sugar' Segerman and Craig Bartholomew Strydom, 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. This documentary is elaborately designed with a few skills of suspense films. Rodriguez himself is extremely dramatic: he’s zero in US, while hero in South Africa. 36-year-old Swede, Malik Bendjelloul, ever co-worked with many outstanding musicians, such as Björk and Die Prinzen, during the work at a TV station, so he is an insider without doubt. He was completely amazed the first time he heard Rodriguez’s song in Cape Town when he resigned in 2006 and went for backpacker tourism in Africa with then girlfriend. Malik originally planned to make a seven-minute video to be broadcasted on TV, however, only collecting information had taken several months. Malik told himself over and over again: This is a bigger story, and this should be a movie. Malik decided to stay in Cape Town and made friend with Rodriguez through the latter’s daughter. However, it is at the third year when Malik flew to Detroit that these two men met each other. At first, Rodriguez was reluctant to be shot, but when he saw Malik shot the snow scene of Detroit early in the morning at minus 20 degrees, he was deeply touched by that young face, red with cold and agreed to take a very short interviews. The biggest difficulty lay in funds. If you are an investor, would you invest in a documentary about an artist that nobody knows about, the directorial debut of a young director? Swedish Film Institute ever provided him support funds, which, however, was withdrew in the third year of film shooting. At first, Malik used Super 8 video camera, but then, he could not afford the Super 8. At that time, he was excited to find that there was a Super 8 APP in Apple’s App store, so he took most of his material by using this APP priced 1 dollar. Until 2011, the actual shooting part had been basically completed, and the rest parts were post-editing and sound soundtrack, as well as the most important cut scenes. Paying everything for Searching for Sugar Man, Malik almost had nothing to keep it going on. He began to pick up the brush and make some simple illustrations by himself; on the table at him home in Stockholm, he struggled with editing software. This is how he completed the film, suffering various difficulties. His film might be the most inexpensive one, but indeed the best one.