--- name: "Malik Bendjelloul" canonical: "https://film.one/person/malik-bendjelloul" fi1m_id: "malik-bendjelloul" imdb_id: "nm0070594" tmdb_id: 930708 wikidata_id: "Q2271522" roles: ["Producer","Director"] born: "14 September 1977" died: "13 May 2014" reviewed_on_fi1m: 1 average_as: "producer" average_over: 0 updated: "2026-10-10T11:59:39.350408+00:00" licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL." --- # Malik Bendjelloul ## Identity Malik Bendjelloul - **Canonical:** https://film.one/person/malik-bendjelloul - **Type:** Person - **Fi1m ID:** malik-bendjelloul - **IMDb ID:** nm0070594 - **TMDB ID:** 930708 - **Wikidata ID:** Q2271522 - **Same entity:** https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2271522, https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0070594/, https://www.themoviedb.org/person/930708 Producer and director. Born 14 September 1977 in Ystad, Svezia. Died 13 May 2014. ## Details - **Work:** Producer, Director - **Born:** 14 September 1977, Ystad, Svezia - **Died:** 13 May 2014 - **Elsewhere:** https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2271522, https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0070594/, https://www.themoviedb.org/person/930708 ## Streaming the US now - **Disney+:** [*Searching for Sugar Man*](https://film.one/film/searching-for-sugar-man.md) (74) For United States; add `?region=XX` for another country. ## Fi1m on Malik Bendjelloul > Malik Bendjelloul made one feature, and it tells a true story the way a fairy tale does, which is its charm and its problem. *Searching for Sugar Man* is warm, brisk and well cut, and it has quietly left things out to keep the spell. Nobody had a photograph of Rodriguez walking the Detroit streets in the years when his records were not selling, so Bendjelloul painted one: a figure in a long coat, under a low grey sky, drawn by hand and dropped in among the interviews. It is the method of the whole film. Where the record is missing, he supplies it, and he supplies it so gracefully that you do not notice the join until later. He came to it from Swedish television, where he had been a reporter for SVT's Kobra and had made short music documentaries on Kraftwerk, Björk, Elton John and Rod Stewart. In 2006 he quit, spent six months travelling in Africa and South America with a camera, and heard the Rodriguez story in Cape Town. He said afterwards that he did not really like music documentaries, and the film bears that out: it is a detective story, told by two fans, in which the songs happen to be the clues. Work began in 2008 and took four years. The money ran out, and he ended up directing, writing, editing, producing, composing the incidental music, drawing the illustrations and shooting the last stylised sequences on an iPhone app to match the Super 8 he could no longer afford. What works is the confidence. Camilla Skagerström shoots Cape Town as sun and white walls and Detroit as snow and shutters, and Bendjelloul cuts between them so that the two cities look like opposites, which is the point. He lets the songs run long because he knows they can take it. When "Sugar Man" came in over the coast road out of Cape Town, blue sea on one side and the mountain on the other, we sat up, and nobody had needed to tell us the man was a genius first. Mike Theodore and Dennis Coffey, who produced the first record, are allowed to be baffled rather than reverent, and the film is better for it. What does not work is the tidying, and we minded it more than most critics did. A man unknown everywhere but South Africa is a better story than the true one, in which he had toured Australia in the late seventies and early eighties, and Bendjelloul simply leaves those years out. He does not lie. He does not mention them. The film also keeps circling back to Clarence Avant and the question of where the money went, four times when once would have done, as if aware that this was the one thread it could not settle by charm. He died in 2014, two years after the film came out, and this is the whole of the work: one feature, made almost entirely by one pair of hands. It is a good first film, and we will not find out what the second would have been. See it for the songs and the two cities, and do your sums afterwards, not during. ## Biography Malik Bendjelloul was a Swedish documentary filmmaker, journalist and former actor. He directed, wrote, edited and co-produced the 2012 documentary *Searching for Sugar Man*, which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and the BAFTA Award for Best Documentary. Bendjelloul was born in Ystad, Sweden, in 1977. As a child he appeared in the Swedish television series *Ebba och Didrik* (1990), directed by his uncle. He later studied journalism and media production at Kalmar University and worked as a reporter and filmmaker for Swedish public television, making short music documentaries before his feature debut. He died in Stockholm in 2014 at the age of 36. *Sources: en.wikipedia.org, edition.cnn.com, theguardian.com, reuters.com.* ## On Fi1m (1) - *Searching for Sugar Man* (2012), Fi1m 74, as Self (uncredited) — [page](https://film.one/film/searching-for-sugar-man.md) --- © Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/person/malik-bendjelloul