A grieving Norwegian family find an unlikely source of consolation in the online gaming world in director Benjamin Ree’s partially animated hybrid documentary, Ibelin. Ree and producer Ingvil Giske won wide acclaim and multiple awards for their previous film, The Painter and the Thief (2020), which chronicled the volatile friendship between an artist and the man who stole two of her paintings. Ibelin may prove a tougher sell, with its niche computer-game backdrop and inevitably tragic conclusion. But this is still an uplifting, universally resonant story of communal bonding and healing. Striking use of 3D animation will also boost newsworthy angles and audience interest. Ree’s tender and imaginative screen tribute launches this week with two back-to-back premieres on both sides of the Atlantic, first at Sundance, then on home turf at Tromsø International Film Festival.
Almost 10 years have passed since the death of Mats Steen, who was stricken from a young age with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, an incurable genetic disorder that gradually robbed him of mobility and speech. Mats was a childhood friend of the director, and Ibelin opens with a charmingly retro montage of family home videos chronicling his short life, from lively baby to sickly child, a wheelchair user in his teens, then an increasingly withdrawn young man heavily reliant on medical science to keep him alive. When he dies, aged just 25, his mother Trude, father Robert and sister Mia are understandably devastated. But then a flood of condolence messages begin arriving from online friends all across Europe, forcing the family to re-evaluate a life they had previously deemed to be lonely and loveless.
In an inspired stylistic device, Ree and a 3D animation team led by Rasmus Tukia have recreated extensive episodes from Mats’ online life as “Ibelin”, his avatar in the hugely popular role-playing fantasy computer game World of Warcraft, where he built up a close-knit community of friends and fellow gamers. Mimicking the boxy graphics of the game, these gleaming animations are not quite at the world-beating level of James Cameron’s Avatar, but they do have an immersive, seductively dreamlike quality. Crucially, game-play offers users like Mats an escape from the limitations of their physical bodies into an alternate virtual realm of fairy-tale kingdoms, ruggedly handsome digital warriors and Manic Pixel Dream Girls.
Conveniently for Ree, the World of Warcraft sub-group that Mats belonged to archived many thousands of pages of their interactions, allowing the director and his team to accurately reconstruct real game-play. After first introducing them in avatar form, the film-makers then interview several of this group in person. One, Lisette, became the closest thing Mats ever had to a romantic partner. Another, Horsens, credits Mats with helping her connect with her autistic son, first by encouraging her to hug him online, then in real life. The group developed a warm communal bond offline too, but any time they suggested meeting up in person or even on video calls, Mats always found an excuse not to participate. In his final years, he also wrote a public blog, which Ree quotes extensively here.
The nuanced picture of Mats that emerges in Ibelin is mostly of a thoughtful and empathetic soul, but also a serial flirt given to occasionally belligerent outbursts. Happily, this emotionally rich back story provides a great deal of posthumous comfort to his family. Robert Steen even jokes about his fatherly pride in discovering his son was a “womaniser” in the virtual realm, a consolation prize for being denied any chance of romance in the physical world.
Ree works hard to construct a happy ending for an overwhelmingly tragic life story, and he succeeds up to a point. A more psychologically complex film might have touched on thorny debates about how computer games impact on mental health and negative body image, especially for disabled users, but that may have added too much darkness to a documentary that wears its feel-good intentions very overtly. Uno Helmersson’s score, all soft piano twinkles and cloying stings, certainly leans heavily into sentimentality.
But it feels a little callous to critique a film with such impeccably worthy motives and high-end technical credentials. Ibelin is ultimately a heart-warming memorial to Mats, and a comforting exercise in closure for his friends and family.
Director, screenwriter: Benjamin Ree
Producer: Ingvil Giske
Cinematography: Rasmus Tukia, Tore Vollan
3D animator: Rasmus Tukia
2D animator: Ada Wikdahl
Editing: Editor: Robert Stengard
Composer: Uno Helmersson
Production company: Medieoperatørene (Norway)
World sales: Autlook, Vienna
Venue: Tromsø International Film Festival
In Norwegian, English
104 minutes
