In the late '60s, a musician was discovered in a Detroit bar by two celebrated producers who were struck by his soulful melodies and prophetic lyrics. They recorded an album that they believed was going to secure his reputation as one of the greatest recording artists of his generation. In fact, the album bombed and the singer disappeared into obscurity amid rumors of a gruesome on-stage suicide. But a bootleg recording found its way into apartheid South Africa and, over the next two decades, it became a phenomenon. Two South African fans then set out to find out what really happened to their hero. Their investigation led them to a story more extraordinary than any of the existing myths about the artist known as Rodriguez. This is a film about hope, inspiration and the resonating power of music.
Reviews
The Daily Mail
Chris Tookey
“If you watch no other film this month, do see this one. It’s truly amazing. Let’s hope the big, corporate multiplexes allow a little leeway to a film that isn’t about a comic-book hero and reserve a small screen to honour a real one. If they do, it could run for months — the word of mouth will be that good.”
27/06/2012
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The Independent
Geoffrey MacNab
“It helps that Rodriguez's music stands up remarkably well. He is a Woody Guthrie-like balladeer writing songs that are angry, tender and humorous by turns. It's also to the film-makers' benefit that, for all his ostensible stage fright, he is remarkably charismatic when he is finally prised out into the open. With his long black hair, the Mexican-American singer-songwriter looks a little like Jim Morrison. He also still dresses like a rock star, even if he has been living a resolutely blue-collar life for the past 30 years, helping demolish derelict houses and lugging refrigerators up and down staircases. ”
27/07/2012
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The Los Angeles Times
Betsy Sharkey
“To deal with the early years, where there is no footage to be had, the filmmaker shifts between actual shots of the singer's Detroit neighborhood and animation of those streets. Sketches he made of the lanky singer move slowly through the frame. The technique is handled with such subtlety that it is barely discernible when animation dissolves into reality. It is a slow tease of a film, as Bendjelloul wends his way through the many myths and pieces together the reality. But finally, there is Sixto Rodriguez. A modest man of modest means, he quietly reflects on the success he now enjoys a continent away from his Detroit home and the hard times in between.”
26/07/2012
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Empire Magazine
Anna Smith
“This is the quest of two South Africans to find their hero, following clues in song lyrics and launching campaigns to discover the fate of the man said to have killed himself on stage. The journey’s a blast — and the story isn’t over yet. ”
24/07/2012
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The Evening Standard
Derek Malcolm
“You come away wondering why America never recognised a true original. Too good, perhaps, for a society which prefers superstars to sugar men?”
27/07/2012
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The Financial Times
Nigel Andrews
“A head-spinning, signpost-turning, psyche-twirling treat: a music-culture Cinderella story to beat them all. ”
26/07/2012
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The New York Times
Manohla Dargis
“Using a well-balanced mix of talking-head interviews, archival imagery and some dreamy animated sequences, Mr. Bendjelloul builds a narrative that simultaneously moves in two seemingly opposite if complementary directions. Interview by interview, location by location, he tries to go into the mystery of a single man even as he heads out into a world that initially rejected Rodriguez and then embraced him. Each interview adds another piece to the puzzle. Mr. Coffey and Mr. Theodore describe what it was like the first time they saw Rodriguez, who was playing with his back to the audience; Mr. Segerman and others explain what this music meant if you were a young, white South African and grasping for hope in the somber, at times despairing songs of a Detroit musician.”
26/07/2012
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The Scotsman
Alistair Harkness
“The film picks up the quest of two fans as they set out to find out how he really died. What they unearth is a bizarre story, one that is more mundane than the legend but also more magical and enduring.”
26/07/2012
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The Daily Telegraph
Robbie Collin
“The good news about Searching for Sugar Man is that it is not a summer blockbuster about a man endowed with superpowers after eating a spoonful of radioactive demerara. The better news is that it is one of the most uplifting documentaries in recent memory.”
26/07/2012
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Time Out
Trevor Johnston
“Part of the strangeness of the Rodriguez story is that he was never a star in the first place. Director Malik Bendjelloul treats us to generous slices of his early ’70s albums ‘Cold Fact’ and ‘Coming from Reality’. The quality of the material is so striking – phantasmagorical lyrics shape a folk-pop hybrid comparable to Cat Stevens and Nick Drake – that it’s hard to believe the records disappeared without trace after their initial US release. ”
25/07/2012
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The Times
Wendy Ide
“It’s a treasure hunt of a movie that repays in musical gold.”
27/07/2012
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Total Film
Matt Glasby
“It’s easy to see why Rodriguez’s music struck a nerve in Apartheid-era SA . Dylanesque in their gentle protesting, though more melodic, his songs “gave people permission to free their minds”, as one journo puts it, even as contentious tracks were scratched off the vinyl by censors. It’s harder to see why he didn’t catch on in his homeland. Songs such as the haunted ‘Sugar Man’ are lost classics, blessing Bendjelloul’s four-star doc with a five-star soundtrack.”
16/07/2012
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The Sunday Times
Cosmo Landesman
“The film is at pains to establish Rodriguez’s credentials as a protest singer who inspired a generation of young, white, middle-class South African liberals to take a stand against apartheid. The link is pretty tenuous. One of the film’s contributors says: “He gave people permission to free their minds” — but that is true of all pop groups in the 1960s. Some of his songs were censored by the South African authorities, but Puff the Magic Dragon, by Peter, Paul and Mary, was also banned. The South African section lasts too long and isn’t really germane to the story.”
29/07/2012
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The Observer
Philip French
“There are many things we'd like to know about Rodriguez and his background. I'd be interested to hear more about what happened to the royalties sent by his South African publishers that never reached him, though there is a wonderfully evasive interview with the former director of a Detroit record company now living beneath the Hollywood sign in Los Angeles. But it's a revealing tale of showbusiness and its operations, of how someone could disappear almost without trace in a world where everything appears to be known and all information is available at the speed of a mouse.”
29/07/2012
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The Independent on Sunday
Jonathan Romney
“Some poignant facts emerge, including one that goes right to the top of the couldn't-make-it-up file: his record company dropped him two weeks before Christmas, shortly after he'd recorded a song that began, "I lost my job two weeks before Christmas."”
29/07/2012
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The Guardian
Peter Bradshaw
“There is something fascinating in the reclusive rock star who vanishes. In real life, it is Syd Barrett or Peter Green, in fiction, Bucky Wunderlick in Don DeLillo's novel Great Jones Street, or Richard Katz in Jonathan Franzen's Freedom. But none of these examples exactly matches the extraordinary case of Rodriguez. The truth about him – hard to get at in that pre-internet age, and still not entirely illuminated in this film – turned out to be stranger than fiction.”
26/07/2012
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The New Statesman
Ryan Gilbey
“With his papery skin, Jackie O shades and lips pursed in mild amusement, the latter-day Rodriguez seems nonplussed when asked about the success to which he was oblivious. But he is, after all, being quizzed about a shock he received more than a decade earlier and it’s hard to shake the suspicion that this story was over long before we got here. The feeling is not staved off by the film-maker Malik Bendjelloul’s retrospective pop videos, where Rodriguez’s effortlessly authentic music accompanies contrived new footage (Rodriguez opens a window! Rodriguez plods through the Detroit snow in his Johnny Cash coat!).”
26/07/2012
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