SIXTO RODRIGUEZ R.I.P. Searching For Sugar Man [2012]

SIXTO RODRIGUEZ R.I.P.

Searching For Sugar Man [2012]

Sixto Diaz Rodriguez (July 10, 1942 – August 8, 2023), known professionally as Rodriguez, was an American singer-songwriter from Detroit, Michigan. Though his career was initially met with little fanfare in the United States, he found success in South Africa, Australia (touring the country twice in his earlier career), and New Zealand. Unbeknownst to him for decades, his music was extremely successful and influential in South Africa, where he is believed to have sold more records than Elvis Presley, as well as other countries in southern Africa. Information about him was scarce, and it was incorrectly rumored there that he had died by suicide shortly after releasing his second album.

In the 1990s, determined South African fans managed to find and contact Rodriguez, which led to an unexpected revival of his musical career. This was told in the 2012 Academy Award-winning documentary film Searching for Sugar Man and helped give Rodriguez a measure of fame in his home country. In May 2013, Rodriguez received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from his alma mater, Wayne State University, in Detroit.

Rodriguez lived in Detroit's historic Woodbridge neighborhood, through which he is seen walking in Searching for Sugar Man. He lived a simple life, possessing no telephone, and occasionally visited bars in the Cass Corridor section of Detroit near Woodbridge and Midtown, such as the Old Miami pub, where he performed live concerts for small local crowds. (Wikipedia)

In the early 1970's, Sixto Rodriguez was a Detroit folksinger who had a short-lived recording career with only two well received but non-selling albums. Unknown to Rodriguez, his musical story continued in South Africa where he became a pop music icon and inspiration for generations. Long rumored there to be dead by suicide, a few fans in the 1990's decided to seek out the truth of their hero's fate. What follows is a bizarrely heartening story in which they found far more in their quest than they ever hoped, while a Detroit construction laborer discovered that his lost artistic dreams came true after all.

Searching for Sugar Man is a 2012 Swedish–British–Finnish documentary film about a South African cultural phenomenon, directed and written by Malik Bendjelloul, which details the efforts in the late 1990's of two Cape Town fans, 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 had never achieved success in the United States, had become very popular in South Africa although little was known about him in that country. 

The film's narrative of a South African story about an American musician omits that Rodriguez was successful in Australia in the 1970's and toured there in 1979 and 1981. South Africans were unaware of his Australian success due to the harsh censorship enacted by the apartheid regime coupled with international sanctions that made any communication with the outside world on the subject of banned artists virtually impossible.

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 at the 85th Academy Awards in Hollywood.

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