https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pglHiP-JLA4

Swedish director Malik Bendjelloul, who won an Oscar for his 2012 documentary, “Searching for Sugar Man,” died at age 36 in Stockholm, TT news agency reported.

According to the the NYTimes, Bendjelloul’s brother, Johar, told the Associated Press that it was a suicide, giving no other details. He told another news organization that his brother had struggled with depression.

An inexperienced filmmaker when he started the project, Bendjelloul edited “Searching for Sugar Man” in his Stockholm apartment and paid for most of it himself.

First-time director Bendjelloul won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature Film. He told the story of U.S. musician Sixto Rodriguez who became famous in South Africa without knowing it.

Rodriguez made two albums in the early 1970s but they were commercial failures. He stopped making music and disappeared, working in construction in the U.S.

However his songs became major hits in South Africa thanks to bootleg copy of his first album, “Cold Fact,” that made it to South Africa, where it struck a chord with progressive young whites exasperated with apartheid, TopWorldNews reports.

The film got its title from “Sugar Man,” a song about a drug dealer on Rodriguez’s 1970
album, “Cold Fact.”

Because Rodriguez was absent, bizarre stories circulated him including one claimimg he had committed suicide by setting himself alight on stage.

Two fans found him alive, living in the U.S. and brought him to South Africa where he was greeted as a hero in 1998. He performed at six sold-out concerts.

“Searching for Sugar Man” tells the story of the two fans’ search for Rodriguez, and of
his musical rebirth.

“This was the greatest, the most amazing, true story I’d ever heard, an almost archetypal
fairy tale,” Bendjelloul said in a 2012 interview in the NYTimes. “It’s a perfect story. It has the human element, the music aspect, a resurrection and a detective story.”