Avicii: True Stories

Levan Tsikurishvili followed Tim Bergling for more than four years and produced a documentary that becomes progressively harder to watch. It opens on success: one of the highest-earning DJs alive, chart-dominating records, full stadiums. Then the camera goes inside the tour bus, and something else is there. In 2016, at twenty-six, Bergling announced he was giving up live performance. The film shows how that decision formed: health problems, anxiety, months without sleep, and everyone around him pushing for one more tour. Chris Martin, Nile Rodgers and David Guetta appear, but the most striking material comes from Bergling's own archive. The film opened in cinemas on 26 October 2017. Bergling died in 2018. It is therefore a documentary watched with its ending already known, which gives it an entirely different weight. Who it is for: viewers interested in electronic music and in accounts of what fame costs. Who it is not for: anyone who would rather not go near the subjects of mental health and suicide.