Acclaimed documentary The Remarkable Life Of Ibelin is the moving story of the secret online life of Mats Steen, a Norwegian man with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a rare disease which caused his muscles to stop development. He passed away in 2014 at the age of 25, with his parents – Robert and Trude Steen – both assuming that he lived a tragic, lonely life due to the amount of time he spent in front of the computer.
It wasn’t until they announced his death that they discovered he had connected with hundreds of people via Warcraft and was an integral part of several communities within that world. He had countless friends he’d never met, and had inspired them in ways they could never imagined – and his parents had no idea this was happening for years all under their roof.
Naturally, the moving story made national headlines in Norway, before spreading internationally via a viral BBC article in 2019. It caught the attention of a lot of documentary filmmakers, but the family were resistant to having this story told onscreen.
As Robert told Zavvi: “We had requests from directors all over the world to make this, and we said no to all of them. It was only when Benjamin Ree got in touch that we started to consider it; my younger brother was his teacher in school, funnily enough, and he advised that if we ever did make this, it had to be with him.
“That was instrumental in us saying yes to the documentary, because this is story is so close to us. Family is the most sacred thing in your life, and you don’t just share it with anyone – although that is what we’ve done now!”
Making the movie was something of a full circle moment for Ree. Not only did Mats’ uncle inspire him to become a director in the first place, he discovered from going through the family’s archives that he had been friends with Mats at a very young age – a video of the two boys playing together further convinced the family that he would do a sensitive job handling their story.
However, this wouldn’t be about the Mats his family knew, but Ibelin, his online avatar named after Orlando Bloom’s protagonist in Kingdom Of Heaven. His friends had backed up all their forum conversations, with 43,000 pages charting the community’s growth throughout the decade, and it’s here that the director realised that this was a coming-of-age story above anything else.
He told us: “He had made a lot of the same mistakes that I did when growing up, and I found that very compelling. I wanted to explore what it was like to grow up inside the game, and the ways in which this is similar to the universal coming of age experience.
“Mats was a fantastic friend, but he also messed up and lost contact with many of them. It’s a very relatable part of growing up.”
Ree knew very early into the process that he wanted to tell this story within World Of Warcraft, dramatising the server transcripts using player avatars. However, he knew nothing about the game – he confesses to being a “film nerd” first and foremost – so teamed up with YouTube fan animators with more than 20,000 hours logged in the game to bring this world to life.
However, there was one potential obstacle: Ree had not reached out to Blizzard Entertainment, the publishers of the game, for permission to use it in his film.
“It was coming up to three years of working on the movie when we finally approached them. We said that we were a small Norwegian production company, and wanted to use their world for free, without any involvement or oversight from them – we were invited to show them the film in California, as they were very curious.
“We had no plan B, and I was so nervous when we screened it for them. During the end credits, I dared to look up and see if I could read the reactions on the faces from the bosses at Blizzard, and I saw that they were crying – they gave us the rights, which was a very big turning point.
“They’ve been very supportive of us and understand the value of this production.”
It was a triumphant moment that almost didn’t happen. As you might expect with 43,000 pages of transcripts to build a narrative around, Ree initially had trouble telling the story, with several disastrous test screenings for each early cut.
“After working in the editing room for a year, the film still didn’t work. People did not want to go into that virtual world in test screenings, which meant that they weren’t invested in Ibelin as a character at all – they were jarred going from following a family in traditional form, to suddenly being in an animated world.
“To change that contract with the audience was very tricky. One key moment was hearing about Mats dreaming about wanting to experience love, and then the first animated scene that follows was him flirting and experiencing that – I think the placement of those scenes changed the whole film, as suddenly the audience wanted to go there, and be invested in his character.”
As well as server transcripts, Ree also had several public blog posts that Mats’ wrote in the last year of his life to work from. The challenge of condensing an entire life into a brisk 103-minute runtime meant that a lot was left on the cutting room floor; the director is still sad that a trial sequence within World of Warcraft had to be cut out when test audiences were baffled by this ten-minute courtroom drama interlude.
However, if you ask Mats’ parents, the film turned out perfectly, the culmination of an “emotional rollercoaster” that started speeding long before their son passed.
As Robert explained: “For 25 years, four months and 15 days, we lived together under the same roof. We saw each other 24/7, and yet we’re still learning things about each other ten years after he passed – it's one of the universal questions this movie raises, about how much we know the people we spend every day with.
“People hide their emotions throughout their life, and Benjamin has given us a huge degree of insight into what happened inside Mats’ head throughout the years he lived with us. It’s a gift to be enter into his emotional life, and the life he lived online, in a way few parents of our generation have been able to.”
More than anything, the experience has helped transform how he perceives gamers who spend hours a day glued to their screens.
“We’re traditional parents, we saw gaming as a waste of time with no real value – our concern was always how we could limit the amount of time children spend in front of a screen. As Mats was so severely ill, we accepted that he’d spend a lot of time there, but we perceived it as a lonely life – we always thought he was an isolated boy.
“He lost his ability to walk when he was eight, and lost his friends when he was 12, and stayed inside the house almost entirely from there. Nobody came knocking on the door for the final ten years of his life, so we were surprised to learn that he was extremely happy throughout those years.
“He was never alone, and he was never without love – he was even accused of being a womaniser for dating several girls at the same time! He made a huge impact in people’s lives, which is the most important thing we as human beings can experience.”
The story moved countless others in Norway too, with the Norwegian government even removing gaming from their list of addictive activities after seeing the positive effect it had on Mats’ life.
“I feel like our entire generation had a negative perception of video gamers”, Robert concluded. “But it’s the people of our generation who are the ones watching this movie, and it’s created a lot of good discussions between generations, who have been divided by that technology.
“One of the former General Secretaries of the Red Cross in Norway reached out to us and said he thought Mats had a superpower to make the most out of the life he was given and used that to help others. The government is even looking into making an annual award for the person who can make the most out of their circumstances and help others in the same way – it's changing a culture that’s for a long time been focused on enriching ourselves rather than helping others.”
The Remarkable Life Of Ibelin Is Streaming On Netflix From Friday, 25th October.
