Searching for Sugar Man

Searching for Sugar Man (2012) is a documentary by Malik Bendjelloul that you can watch online on iFILM. It follows a chase across two continents for a musician who had no idea he'd become a legend.

In the early 1970s a Detroit folk-rock singer named Rodriguez cut two albums and vanished — back home almost nobody bought them. In apartheid-era South Africa, though, his songs outsold Elvis and turned into protest anthems, and fans there were sure he had killed himself on stage years earlier. Two of them, record-store owner Stephen Segerman and journalist Craig Bartholomew Strydom, start digging for the truth, tracing pressing-plant royalties and old liner notes to find out who Rodriguez really was.

The film took home the Academy Award and the BAFTA for best documentary, and within a couple of years of that win Bendjelloul died — this remained his only feature. It's for anyone who likes a true story stranger than anything a screenwriter would dare invent. Stream Searching for Sugar Man (2012) online on iFILM.