Last week, at the 85th Academy
Awards, alongside major productions with multiple nominations and wins (such as Lincoln or Les Misérables) and highly politically and socially engaged documentaries (the Palestinian Five Broken Cameras and the Israeli The Gatekeepers, which portrayed the same reality from two opposing points of view, for example) there was a small film, shot partly on Super 8 and partly with an iPhone (using this app) because the funds for its production had run out before filming was complete. That small film was Searching for Sugar Man, the winner in the best documentary category.

The film by young Swedish director Malik Bendjelloul tells the extraordinary story of Sixto Díaz Rodríguez, a Hispanic-American musician from Detroit, better (un)known simply as Rodríguez. In the late 1960s, the singer had been spotted by two famous music producers of the time, who went on to have him record two albums for the Sussex label: Cold Fact in 1970 and Coming from Reality in 1971. After a few live dates in Australia, nothing more: his records remained unsold, his music fell into oblivion and he disappeared from the scene, resigned to a simple and thoroughly ordinary life away from the stage, made up of occasional work as a labourer in a Detroit that was a symbol of industrial America.

His life continues in the same way for forty years, punctuated only by the odd amateur concert in fourth-rate venues around the city and little else. All of this while he remains unaware of one small detail: his name is a cult in South Africa, where he is better known than Elvis Presley and where his music and lyrics are a symbol of freedom and struggle in the same way that Bob Dylan's verses are in the United States.

The Rodríguez phenomenon had, in fact, exploded in South Africa in the 1980s: apparently an American girl had given a bootleg cassette of the album Cold Fact, smuggled in, to a friend of hers in Johannesburg, who had played it on the radio. Before long, thousands of copies were being circulated clandestinely despite the authorities banning its public reproduction, and his notes and words quickly became the protest anthem of white South African youth against the absurd apartheid regime. An overwhelming success. The myth was fuelled even further by strange legends about his death: unable to find any information about Rodríguez, South African fans soon declared him dead — from a heroin overdose, or in prison after shooting his wife, or else on stage, killed by a gunshot to the temple.

The turning point comes in 1998: two fans decide to track down Sixto and, with the help of a journalist, manage (almost inexplicably) to find him and persuade him to give a concert in Johannesburg itself. The audience can hardly believe it; many think that whoever takes the stage will be an impostor. But at the first chord there is no doubt: Rodríguez has risen from the dead. Or perhaps he never died at all. His South African tour sells out, but in the United States his name remains virtually unknown. Now, however, Searching for Sugar Man (which won dozens of awards before reaching the Oscars) has made him known around the world, and the seventy-year-old Sixto Díaz Rodríguez has already managed to perform on celebrated stages such as the Highline Ballroom in New York and the Roundhouse in London.

Those who have seen him live speak of an emotionally extraordinary concert: a nearly blind seventy-year-old who has stood still at forty years ago. Whereas the Bob Dylan or Neil Young of today are seasoned artists marked by forty years of an artistic career, Rodriguez is marked only by years of real life, and the lack of use has kept his voice and his singing both strong and fragile at the same time. A fantastic story, worthy of the finest novels. But it is entirely real, and for that reason it fills the heart with hope. As The Guardian puts it: "Rodríguez, perhaps, never really needed America, but it would seem that America most certainly needs him. And as they say, better late than never." Almost reminding us that beautiful things, sooner or later, truly are discovered.