Arena Season 2022

In 1970, film-maker Luchino Visconti travelled throughout Europe looking for the perfect boy to personify absolute beauty as the character of Tadzio in his adaptation for the screen of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. In Stockholm, he discovered Björn Andrésen, a shy 15-year-old teenager whom he brought to international fame overnight and, as a consequence, changed the course of the boy’s life. The remainder of Bjorn’s youth was turbulent and intense and took him from the Lido in Venice to London, to a welter of attention at the Cannes Film Festival, and to Japan. Fifty years after the premiere of Death in Venice, Björn takes us on a remarkable journey back through his life in a film composed of personal memories, cinema history, stardust and tragedy - as he makes a late attempt to reconcile with his past and finally get his life back on track.