Passion Celebrates Oscar Win for Malik Benjelloul

Passion Pictures is overwhelmingly proud to announce that Searching for Sugar Man has won the Oscar in the 85th Academy Awards® for Best Documentary Feature.  This is a debut film for director Malik Benjelloul and is a Red Box Films/Passion Pictures production in association with Canfield Pictures and The Documentary Company.   

 

This is Passion’s third Oscar win.  One Day in September directed by Kevin MacDonald won Best Documentary Feature in 2000 and The Lost Thing directed by Andrew Ruhemann and Shaun Tan won Best Short Animation in 2011.  The company also won two BAFTA awards earlier this month.  Searching for Sugar Man won Best Documentary and The Imposter directed by Bart Layton won Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer.

 

In Searching for Sugar Man, a musician is discovered in a Detroit bar in the late 60s by two celebrated producers struck by his soulful melodies and prophetic lyrics.  They record an album which they believe is going to secure his reputation as the greatest recording artist of his generation.  In fact, the album bombs and the singer disappears into obscurity amid rumours of a gruesome on-stage suicide.  But a bootleg recording finds its way into apartheid South Africa and, over the next two decades, it becomes a phenomenon.  Two South African fans then set out to find out what really happened to their hero.  Their investigation leads them to a story more extraordinary than any of the existing myths about the artist known as Sixto Rodriguez.  This is a film about hope, inspiration and the power of music.