Obscure Sugar

Malik Bendjelloul calls himself a storyteller, but he's just as much a collector of stories. For years, the 35-year-old filmmaker worked for Swedish television while travelling the globe, collecting small tales and bizarre anecdotes, including the true-life tales that would end up being turned into Hollywood concoctions The Terminal and The Men Who Stare At Goats. Bendjelloul would turn these stories into TV segments he approached as six-minute short films, but was always hoping he'd, one day, find the story he'd want to make into a feature.

Then, in 2006, in South Africa, he struck gold, when a Cape Town record store owner told him the legend of Sixto Rodriguez, an obscure folkie singer-songwriter from the early '70s who disappeared into oblivion in his hometown of Detroit, yet became a counter-cultural figure – and anti-apartheid touchstone – in '80s South Africa.

“It was the best story I'd ever heard in my whole life,” Bendjelloul says. “I got completely obsessed with telling this story. I'm a storyteller, that's what I do. So, this one felt like the big one... It sounded like it was a script. Like a writer had a good day and came up with this amazing idea. But maybe it wouldn't have been a good script, because it would've been too unbelievable for someone to make this up. Like everything is just a bit too much. But when it's a true story, you don't pick it apart, you don't complain, you just say: 'Wow! That actually happened!'”

Somehow – popular myth traces it back, perhaps, to one song on one mixed tape brought back from America – Rodriguez's two obscure, forgotten, Nick Drake-sih LPs found their way from America to South Africa. There, their tales of anti-establishment rebellion struck a profound chord with local listeners. “They talk about him in the same breath as The Beatles and The Stones,” Bendjelloul explains. “Rodriguez everywhere else in the world is for people in record stores. In South Africa, it's people on the street, it's everyone.”

Of course, whilst he became famous in a far-off country, Rodriguez never knew; somewhere between an isolated, state-controlled country and a reclusive songwriter living without a telephone, the news got lost on the way. So, “tragically and horribly”, did the royalties. In South Africa, Rodriguez became a myth; the lack of biographical information leading to tall tales, including an urban legend that he died after setting fire to himself on stage. “For them, he was a dead man,” Bendjelloul says. “They were never looking to see if he's dead or alive, they're only trying to find out how he did die.”

When a South African journalist eventually went digging for the facts of Rodriguez's demise in the late-'90s, they discovered that, shockingly, he was very much alive, and that he'd spent the years working in demolition, and even served as a local politician. He was brought back to South Africa for a hero's welcome, and eventually Rodriguez returned to touring, coming to Australia in 2007 and 2010.

Now, Rodriguez plays after Searching For Sugarman, the film Bendjelloul made about his story. “He plays songs in the cinema, and people go crazy for him,” the filmmaker beams. “After they've seen this movie for 82 minutes, they love him. They're singing, dancing, crying. They've been insane reactions that we've had so far.”