Norwegian filmmaker Benjamin Ree’s parents happened to be friends in the late 1980s with another couple, the Steens, whose son Mats had been born with Duchene muscular dystrophy. Benjamin was almost exactly the same age as Mats. There is a family photo of them as babies in the same playpen.
“But then my parents moved away from Oslo to the countryside. They lost contact,” Ree recalls.
By coincidence, many years later, Mats’ uncle taught Ree filmmaking. The uncle had written an article about his nephew’s secret gaming life – and that was the seed from which Ree’s new documentary Ibelin grew. (The documentary, sold by Autlook and acquired by Netflix after its Sundance premiere. where it won the Directing and Audience awards, is screening this week in CPH:DOX.)
The article appeared in 2019, five years after Mats had died. The wasting disease had killed him in his mid-20s. He had been wheelchair-bound for much of the latter part of his life. His grief-stricken parents were deeply upset that their son had never [as they saw it] had the chance to experience joy or love to make a difference in people’s lives. It turned out they were wrong. Mats played computer games incessantly, using the ‘avatar’ Ibelin in World of Warcraft. He had many friends online and was part of a very large digital community.
When Ree learned of Mats’ story, he called the uncle. That was how he discovered that Mats’s father had been filming him constantly. There was lots of home movie footage available.
“That was when I thought maybe it is possible to make a film,” Ree recalls.
Earlier in his career, Ree had made Magnus (2016), a well-received film about Norwegian chess prodigy Magnus Carlsen. He saw certain similarities between Mats and the young world chess champ.
“Both of them are playful. Of course, Magnus Carlsen expresses himself through chess playing and he has fantastic intuition. Before big games, he always played with cards with his sisters, he listened to children’ songs, he was jumping in the pool, in a very playful atmosphere. Mats wasn’t able to do the same thing when he was getting older and his muscular dystrophy got worse, but he still had a very playful tone. You can see that in his humour, a lot through his writing in his blog, Musings on Life.”
Ibelin is a film about a subject who was wheelchair-bound for a large part of his life. Nonetheless, it has scope and visual dynamism. Ree takes the decision to dramatise and recreate Mats’ digital life in World Of Warcraft.
“Ibelin as a film has a lot of different forms to tell a story. We begin the story in very traditional documentary style with interviews and archival footage. It’s a traditional family that gets a traditional form. But then, gradually, as we change perspective, as we enter Mats’ perspective, it becomes more essayistic and streams of consciousness…and then gradually the film becomes an animated film. We use both 3D animation from the game but also 2D animation,” the director says of a film that “changes form all the time.”
The director argues that it is still justified to call Ibelin a documentary. The animated parts are all based on events that really happened in the game when Mats was playing it.
And, yes, Ree has played a lot of World of Warcraft himself. His avatar is called Cinclus. He therefore knows exactly what Mats experienced as Ibelin.
The filmmaking team plunged into production, completing the project without actually asking permission from the rights holders behind World of Warcraft. “The reason we did that was then we thought we would keep our artistic freedom,” Ree remembers.
Almost three years later, the filmmakers contacted the World Warcraft organisation [Activision Blizzard]. “We travelled to California. We showed them the film, I was, of course, very nervous,” Ree acknowledges. It had dawned on him that they “didn’t have a plan B.” If they were denied permission to use the World of Warcraft imagery, the entire project could have fallen apart.
Thankfully, they got the go-ahead.
One reason Ibelin has been so popular everywhere it has shown (and why it won the Audience award in Sundance) is that it appeals both to young gaming enthusiasts and to older audiences from the same generation as Mats’ parents (who worried he was wasting his time spending all those hours on the computer).
On the afternoon he speaks to Business Doc Europe, Ree has just come from a screening for pensioners, “80 plus grandparents…who eat waffles.” These old-timers adored the doc.
“In Norway, a lot of them [the older generation] go to the cinema because they want to understand their children or their grandchildren,” the director notes.
In advance of its Netflix launch later in the year, the film has already been screening in cinemas in Norway and has been doing bumper business. Elderly family members are attending the film more than once, going on their own first of all and then attending again with their children and grandchildren. Some have been apologising to their kids for all those times they turned off the computer and told them to do something more constructive with their time.
Meanwhile, young gamers have also embraced the movie and have praised the way it shows that meaningful social relationships can be formed online.
“We really hope that different generations can watch this film together and that it can create some good discussions,” the director says of his ambitions for Ibelin once it is available on Netflix.
It’s a harrowing film to watch – and it was equally emotional to make. Ibelin took two full years to edit. “And after two years of editing, the film still didn’t work!” Ree says of what has been a “very demanding process.”
“I was almost freaking out at one point,” Ree says of his struggles to pull together a film that “changes perspectives, changes forms, all the time and goes in and out of real life and virtual life.”
Alongside the formal challenges was the emotional toll the doc was taking.
“Some weeks, I cried every day when I was at work,” Ree confesses. “I also begin crying when I watch the funeral, although I have seen that scene hundreds of times.”
He now knows Mats’ family very well. Mats’ father recently told him that he had watched Ibelin 80 times. “They [the family] have used the film as part of their healing process, part of their grieving process, and that of course makes me very emotional, to understand they use this film to get to know their son better and to understand who he was in this world.”
