In the recesses of the internet, where reality can feel increasingly fuzzy, one young Norwegian man lacking offline mobility built a world of his own. Mats Steen, the subject of the poignant Netflix documentary The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, formed a digital community that transcended the severe muscular dystrophy he’d developed as a child. While his parents fretted about the many obsessive hours he spent playing World of Warcraft, Steen was using the role-playing game to develop deep friendships and find a voice he couldn’t always access in a literal sense.
The past year, The Remarkable Life of Ibelin has won a Peabody Award and become what director Benjamin Ree calls a “national treasure” in Norway. Now it’s up against I Am: Celine Dion and Patrice: The Movie for the Emmys’ exceptional merit in documentary filmmaking prize, a category nominated by a special jury.
But for Ree, the biggest rewards are the responses he has received from people throughout the world who see themselves in Steen’s experience. One American viewer debating whether to get the tracheostomy needed to prolong his life said he decided to proceed with it once Ibelin showed him the joy available through gaming.
Ree, a former Reuters journalist who also made the acclaimed 2020 documentary The Painter and the Thief, came to Ibelin with a personal connection. His parents were friends with Steen’s folks when the boys were young, and Steen’s uncle was one of Ree’s grade-school teachers. “For me, this was a small Norwegian story,” he tells The Hollywood Reporter.
Steen’s World of Warcraft character Ibelin
Courtesy of Netflix
After Steen died in 2014 at age 25, Ree spent four years with the Steen family to chronicle his dynamic life. Steen had left behind the password to a blog he’d kept, and from there his parents discovered the friends they never knew he had, some of whom revealed that Steen’s generous spirit had saved their lives. Their son, the Steens learned, experienced many of the same things his ambulatory peers might have. As Ibelin, his buff World of Warcraft avatar named after Orlando Bloom’s character in the Ridley Scott epic Kingdom of Heaven, Steen had romances and regularly doled out advice to his pals.
As Ree was tying together multiple perspectives on Steen’s experiences, he looked to several highbrow works of art with overlapping POVs as reference points — chief among them Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane and William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! Using a 42,000-page transcript of Steen and his clique’s computer-generated interactions, Ree hired animators and YouTubers to re-create scenarios from the game that would expand upon Steen’s blog and his parents’ reflections. Their one job qualification: 20,000 hours clocked playing WoW.
Rees restructured the film many times based on test-screening feedback, determined to make it engaging to nongamers like him. He likens the results to a “symphony” returning to the same melodies in different ways over the course of a piece.
“If you look into the future, more and more people will use virtual worlds to communicate,” Ree says. “We need to tell those stories and make those stories accessible for everyone. That is what we’ve tried to do here, so even my grandmother would feel included.”
This story first appeared in an August stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.