The Oscar winning director of Searching For Sugar Man, Malik Bendjelloul died suddenly on Tuesday, May 13, 2014. He was only thirty six. His body was found yesterday in Stockholm. Police could not confirm the cause of death, but said they were not treating it as suspicious.
Malik Bendjelloul was most famous for his 2012 documentary Searching For Sugar Man, for which he won an Oscar and BAFTA in 2013.
Searching For Sugar Man, follows two South Africans as they search for musical legend Rodriguez, a Seventies folk singer whose debut album, Cold Fact, became the soundtrack to the breakdown of the apartheid in the Seventies and Eighties.
“This is the best story I ever heard in my life,” Malik Bendjelloul had said of his decision to make the movie.
After running out of money to make the film, Bendjelloul finished shooting the documentary using an iPhone app
Malik Bendjelloul grew up in central and southern Sweden and acted in Swedish television 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 and later worked as a reporter for Swedish public broadcaster SVT.
Malik Bendjelloul resigned from that job to travel the world and got the idea for Searching For Sugar Man during one of his trips.
