Malik Bendjelloul, Oscar-winning filmmaker, dies

Malik Bendjelloul, the Swedish filmmaker who shot to Hollywood stardom overnight with the Oscar-winning music documentary "Searching for Sugar Man" has died. He was 36.

Bendjelloul died in Stockholm late Tuesday, said Swedish police without specifying where his body was found or the cause of death but adding no crime is suspected in relation to the filmmaker's death.

"Searching for Sugar Man," which tells the story of how singer-songwriter Sixto Rodriguez became a superstar in South Africa without knowing about it, won the Oscar for best documentary in 2013. It was the first time a Swedish film had won an Oscar since Ingmar Bergman's "Fanny and Alexander" in 1984.

"Oh boy!" Bendjelloul exclaimed when he accepted the Oscar for best documentary feature from Ben Affleck last year and proceeded to thank "one of the best singers ever, Rodriguez."

The film also won several other prizes, including a British BAFTA for best documentary and the Swedish Guldbagge award.

Bendjelloul came across details about Rodriguez during a trip to Cape Town and decided to tell his story. The Detroit construction worker's albums had flopped in the United States in the 1970s and he disappeared from public life. But unbeknownst to him, his records with songs protesting the Vietnam War, racial inequality, abuse of women and social mores had developed a cult following in South Africa during the apartheid era.

His South African fans came to believe that Rodriguez had died a bitter death, but it wasn't until after the end of the apartheid regime and the advent of the Internet that the truth was revealed. The film follows the quest of two South African fans to determine Rodriguez's fate. They found him living in obscurity and working on construction sites in Detroit, and brought him to South Africa for a triumphant concert tour.

The documentary's Oscar win led to a career rebirth for Rodriguez who has been touring major venues in the United States.

The soft-spoken, unassuming Bendjelloul worked as a reporter for Sweden's public broadcaster SVT before resigning to backpack around the world. He got the idea for "Searching for Sugar Man" — his first feature film — during one of his trips, but it would take him more than four years to complete the film.

Bendjelloul later recalled that when the film was 90 percent finished, after he had been editing it for three years, the main sponsor said it was lousy and withdrew support.

At this stage he had already used up all his savings and borrowed money from friends, so he stopped working on the movie and took other jobs to make ends meet. He completed the film by shooting the final parts with his smartphone and making his own animations.

Bendjelloul was born in 1977 to Swedish translator Veronica Schildt Bendjelloul and doctor Hacene Bendjelloul and acted in the Swedish TV series "Ebba and Didrik" as a child during the 1990s. He studied journalism and media production at the Linnaeus University of Kalmar in southern Sweden. 

Swedish film critic Hynek Pallas, who traveled with Bendjelloul to Hollywood when he received the Oscar, described him as a modest, but very determined man.

"He was an incredibly talented storyteller," Pallas wrote. "He had the strength of a marathon runner; to work on his film for so many years and sometimes without money, then you have a goal."

The Associated Press