Earlier this year, Norwegian Benjamin Ree’s The Remarkable Life of Ibelin won the Audience Award: World Cinema Documentary and The Directing Award: World Cinema Documentary at Sundance.
The documentary tells the story of Mats Steen, a Norwegian gamer, who died of a degenerative muscular disease at the age of 25. Initially, his parents mourned what they thought had been a lonely and isolated life, until they started receiving messages from online friends around the world…
Director Ree sat down to discuss his film with double-Oscar© nominee Jonas Poher Rasmussen (Flee, 2021), who first asked him how he first got to hear about the story of Mats. Ree had read a story published by the Norwegian Broadcasting System and uploaded to Facebook by Mats’s uncle, a friend of Ree’s and also his teacher at high school.
“He taught me filmmaking when I was in sixth and seventh grade,” says Ree. “I cried a lot when I read that story, for hours actually after reading it. And I called up Mats’s uncle just to tell him how much that story meant to me. And that was when he told me that his brother, Mats’s father, had filmed his whole life. So, he has been there from the day he was born with a S-VHS camera.”
“Then I thought that maybe it’s possible to do a documentary here,” he adds, having previously thought that this was not a cinematic story, but perfect for text.
“But when I heard that he had filmed so much from his life, I contacted Mats’s family and they said that they could give me all this archive footage. So, I got 50 tapes with a lot of family videos. And I knew that my parents and Mats’s parents, they had been in the same group of friends back in the eighties, but my parents moved to the countryside and lost contact with them.
“So, it was a huge surprise to me – when I first saw the footage the first thing I saw was Mats as a baby, and right beside Mats, it was me as a baby. At first, I thought, it can’t be me. What a coincidence. I’m making this film [about] a person I can’t remember. And the first thing I see is Mats and me together in a playpen as babies, but it was me. So that was the very beginning of this process. I’m not a religious person, but I almost became a bit religious when I saw that.”
