'Searching For Sugar Man' Oscar Winner Malik Bendjelloul Dies At 36

FILE - A Dec. 18, 2012 photo from files showing Swedish Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Malik Bendjelloul. Police in Sweden say the film director behind the Oscar-awarded music documentary "Searching for Sugarman," Malik Bendjelloul died Tuesday, May 13, 2014. She said no crime is suspected in relation to the Swedish film maker's death.

Malik Bendjelloul, director of the Oscar-winning documentary Searching for Sugar Man, died today in Stockholm at the age of 36. A police spokeswoman talking to the AP would not specify the cause of death, but said that foul play was not involved. Bendjelloul was born in Sweden in 1977 and worked as a child actor there, later going on to become a reporter for a Swedish public broadcasting company. He eventually quit that job to travel the world, during which time he came across the idea for Searching for Sugar Man, a film chronicling the astonishing life and career of elusive ‘70s folk-rocker Sixto Rodriguez.

Mere hours after the news of the legendary H.R. Giger passing away, tragedy has struck once again in the world of film and cinema. Malik Bendjelloul, who recently won the Academy Award for Best Documentary at the 85th ceremony, was found dead in Stockholm. No cause of death is yet known, but according to Deadline, his death is not being treated as suspicious. One could speculate Malik Bendjelloul would have had a fantastic career in documentary – surely Searching for Sugar Man is proof of that – and it’s truly a shame to see such talent cut short.

Director Malik Bendjelloul, who has a history of making many documentary shorts (many of which feature interviews with musicians ranging from members of U2 to Bjork), literally went around the world searching for a story to tell. He stumbled upon two South African music lovers who went searching for one of their nation's musical icons, an American folk-rock/protest singer named Rodriguez, who put out two album in the 1970s that virtually no one in America purchased. But somehow his second album became a massive hit in South Africa through tape trading and bootleg copies, outselling the likes of the Beatles and Elvis Presley.
It was slightly more than a year ago when Bendjelloul's film Searching for Sugar Man won an Academy Award for Best Documentary. Searching for Sugar Man was the story of how Sixto Rodriguez, an obscure American folk singer from the early 1970s became famous in South Africa and yet was believed to be dead until two of his most devoted South African fans decided to search for him. Here is what I wrote about Searching for Sugar Man after seeing it in October 2012. Here is Bendjelloul and Rodriguez in a joint interview promoting the film.
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