Thursday 31 March 2016

From Cape Town to Detroit the search for Sixto Diaz Rrodriguez.

.Searching for Sugarman was the DVD I had been meaning to watch for ages.

Our Joshua brought it home at Christmas from Leicester and it was a present from Polly’s mum.

And today with Saul back from Poland for the week it seemed a perfectly good moment to run the film.

It is about the search for Sixto Diaz Rodriguez an American singer and song writer who was born in Detroit in 1942.

Saul likes his music and given that during the week we had set aside a shedful of movies to watch together this one seemed a good one to start with.

I have to say I had never heard of him or his music but right away I was hooked on the songs.

During the early 70s Mr Rodriguez released three albums which while they did not sell well in the States were very popular in South Africa, and it was there that the film begins, charting the search for the musician who many believed was dead, and some thought had committed suicide.

Now there is no way I am going to reveal the plot, suffice to say it amounts to a very good detective story with a happy ending.

Much of his music was anti establishment and appealed to an audience of white South Africans opposed to apartheid and uncomfortable with the deeply conservative and authoritarian regime in South Africa.

And so there was something of a history story as well as detective tale, made all the better for sitting there with our Saul.

Location, South Africa, USA

Picture; Sixto Diaz Rodriguez, signing autographs, April 8 2007, Luke Winterton,  Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

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