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.

River takes its audience on a journey through space and time spanning six continents, showing rivers on a scale and from perspectives never seen before.

A hundred years after its publication, this film reveals the tawdry, shocking, poetic, uplifting and gloriously kaleidoscopic humanity of James Joyce’s masterpiece, Ulysses.

An exploration of TS Eliot's The Waste Land, in its centenary year, that for the first time uncovers the personal story behind Eliot's creation of his celebrated poem.

A visually arresting film that documents the story of Haiti's rich past, through an annual carnival in a small southern town.