Avicii - I'm Tim

The title is a sentence. Avicii was the stage name; Tim Bergling was the person. The film opens in a maternity ward in Stockholm in 1989 and ends in Oman in 2018. Henrik Burman directs, Björn Tjärnberg produces. Tim narrates it himself, and the film is built on home footage from the family and a large private archive that had not been used before. That is the whole difference in method. Bergling had recorded himself for years, in studios, hotel rooms, aeroplanes. Burman lays it out chronologically and, instead of interpreting from outside, leaves the man's own voice running. The result is less a documentary about what happened backstage than an archive of someone filming his own collapse. There are interviews with collaborators too, including Coldplay's Chris Martin and Aloe Blacc. It premiered at the Tribeca Festival on 9 June 2024 and arrived on Netflix on 31 December 2024, released the same day as a recording of Bergling's final show at Ushuaïa in Ibiza. Who it is for: listeners of electronic music, and anyone interested in what fame does to mental health. Who it is not for: the exhaustion and the death are addressed directly. If you have been near this, it will be hard.