In early 2024, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, where Netflix quickly snatched it up for worldwide distribution. Now shortlisted for the 2025 Academy Awards, Benjamin Ree’s documentary tells the story of Mats Steen, a young Norwegian who died at 25 from Duchenne muscular dystrophy, an inherited and incurable degenerative neuromuscular disorder.
His parents, Robert and Trude, believed their son had spent his final years in isolation, spending thousands of hours in World of Warcraft, the massively multiplayer online role-playing game, as the hunky blond warrior “Ibelin.” But after posting about his death on his blog, they discovered their son had touched countless lives through his virtual presence.
Through a combination of family video archives, blog entries, and reconstructed gaming footage, director Ree pieced together the story of how Mats found friendship, love, and purpose in an online world his parents never fully understood.
Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Robert, Trude, Ree, and Ibelin producer Ingvil Giske charted the film’s long journey to the screen — how a “tiny Norwegian company” made a movie using some of the best-known gaming IP on the planet (without first asking for permission) and how they hope the film can spark new conversations across generations. “Most parents have no idea about gaming, about one of the most important things their children are doing. I hope one of the outcomes of the movie, is that parents can have these discussions with their children.”
ROBERT STEEN, MAT’S FATHER After Mats’ death, his story was published as an article in the online newspaper of NRK, the Norwegian public broadcaster. It was read by something like 20 percent of the national population within a week. It was a phenomenon.
BENJAMIN REE, DIRECTOR, THE REMARKABLE LIFE OF IBELIN The article came through on my social media feeds. I read it and I cried a lot. I thought it was one of the best feature articles I’d ever read. I didn’t first think about doing a documentary on it. But Matt’s uncle had been my teacher at school. I called him up and he told me his brother, Mats’ father Robert, had filmed Mats whole life, on VHS tapes, from the day he was born till the end. So I contacted Mats’ father and asked him if I could digitalize the tapes and see what was there.
ROBERT STEEN We had a lot of directors, a lot of companies, who wanted to do this story as a movie, but we turned them all down because we knew it would be emotionally tough, it would open up a lot of wounds and memories. We wanted the right person to handle it. My kid brother, who had taught Benjamin in primary school, said Benjamin would be a person you could trust for such a task.
REE We didn’t do a deal or anything. Robert just came over with some VHS tapes and I started digitalizing them. The first footage I saw was Mats as a baby playing in his playpen, and right beside him was this baby who looked like me as a baby. Then I saw my father there. And I realized: It was me as a baby! My parents and Mats’ parents were in the same group of friends back in the late 80s.
ROBERT STEEN Benjamin was seven days younger than our son. They were born in the same hospital, a week apart.
REE I’m not a religious person, but that felt like a sign. Then I learned that Mats had written a blog and, before he died, had left the password for his family to find.
ROBERT STEEN Mats told us that he was gaming with other people, but we thought that these people didn’t know Mats, because they never met physically and they never talked.
TRUDE STEEN, MAT’S MOTHER And then [after he died] we got email after email. We were so confused. [We thought] “Who are these people?”
ROBERT STEEN During his last 10 years, he probably spent 20,000 hours in this gaming world. His world seemed so limited. If you are gaming 12 hours a day, you don’t have time for anything else. You don’t have time to meet your friends. Our deepest sorrow lay in the fact that he would never experience love, friendship or to make a difference in other people’s lives.
REE I learned Mats’ gaming friend group, called Starlight, had stored all this transcription of gaming dialog from their online roll play. That was when I had my idea to recreate an actual lived avatar life. Mats had basically grown up inside this game [World of Warcraft].
I’m very into coming-of-age stories, and I thought: What if, within the film, within the animated part set in the game, we can tell Mats’ coming-of-age story, where he actually grows up, learns, and makes mistakes, inside the game? We had this enormous digital archive and it mirrored that exactly: Mats growing up inside the game.
To my knowledge, this is the first time a film has reconstructed an actual avatar life, told in retrospect, with voice actors reading the dialog but with every aspect taken directly from the transcribed dialog of Mats and his friends. The 3D animation is a kind of dramatization, a reconstruction, but it’s all based on real characters, events and places. We have all the exact data on what was said when and where inside the game.
INGVIL GISKE, PRODUCER, THE REMARKABLE LIFE OF IBELIN In the beginning, we didn’t see any challenges to making the film, we just saw a great story. I’m just too stupid to see how difficult things can be. I think stupidity is a great help in making documentaries. If people knew how difficult things were going to be, a lot of documentaries would never get made.
REE It was a very, very difficult film to make. It was a real challenge to pull off this coming-of-age story within the animation. We spent two years in the editing room. One year in, the film just wasn’t working. The talking heads, the interviews with the family and friends, and the archive VHS footage worked as a traditional documentary but people were not ready to go into the animated part of the film. People were invested in Mats but not in Ibelin, his character from World of Warcraft.
So I started to change the form of the film. I was inspired by Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner, and Citizen Kane, to tell a fragmented approach, with different perspectives on Mats’ story, including Mats’ own perspective.
In the opening, you get the parents’ version of Mats’ story and the film has a traditional form, with talking heads and family videos. The next time we tell the story it’s from Mats’ point of view, using an actor reading his blog as a voiceover. It’s very essayistic, a bit of stream of consciousness, more of an arthouse documentary style. Then we enter the gaming world, it becomes 3D animation, and we get Mats’ friends’ perspective on his life. The film’s form totally changed. And it started working.
We didn’t have any contact with Activision Blizzard, the company that owns World of Warcraft. But all these models from the game, are available online and you have this huge fan community of YouTubers making fan videos based on the games’ characters and graphics.
I found this animator, Rasmus Tukia in Stockholm. I thought he had a big company, because the quality of animation was so good, but it was just him. During the day, he was a student and worked in a warehouse. At night, he did his animations, from his office at the back of his parents’ place. He did all the animation of the film, working for two years from the backroom at his mother’s place. We’d be there working and his mother would call out: “Rasmus, dinner’s ready! Lasagna!” So we’d stop, have some lasagna, and then get back to work.
GISKE It might seem like a daring move, to use Blizzard’s IP without asking, but we didn’t have any other option. This couldn’t have been a film if it was totally controlled by a brand. It had to be independent.
REE Blizzard had no idea we were working on the documentary until we had finished, I think it was, draft 25 or so of the film. Then we contacted them: We’re a little Norwegian company based in Oslo, we’ve made this film using your IP, and we were wondering if we could get approval to use it without any involvement from you? If they said no, we didn’t have a plan B. We went to California to show them the film to the Blizzard bosses. I was extremely nervous. I had to take some extra doses of asthma medicine to cope. After the screening, I did not dare to look up. I just starred at the the ground. Gradually I peaked up and saw one of the top bosses. He looked at me and said: “This film is fantastic. You can have the rights.” Activision Blizzard have been very supportive, but they’ve had no editorial control. We always had final cut. I have to credit Ingvil. She’s much braver than I am. She had the courage to say, “We just make the film and ask for permission afterwards.”
GISKE This is a film that gives the world a totally new view on gaming. Ninety-nine percent of everything that’s written about gaming is negative. This is a positive story. If there was strong involvement from the makers of World of Warcraft, It wouldn’t have been received so well. It wouldn’t have been credible as a documentary.
ROBERT STEEN From the beginning, Benjamin involved us in everything about the film, over the four years he spent making it. It helped prepare us, emotionally, for going back over this story. It became part of the grieving process for us. The first time he showed us the movie, it was an hour, 45 minutes long. He said: “Set aside 3 hours to watch it. It will be just you two in the room. I suggest you bring water and a lot of tissues.”
TRUDE STEEN It’s been 10 years now since he passed, but I must say I still miss him. I’ve seen the film more than 50 times and every time I see him on the screen, I just want to grab him out and take him home with us. But having all these stories [Benjamin found] from the people he helped, that really helped us understand what Mats’ life was really like.
ROBERT STEEN We, I think rightly, defined ourselves as part of the best generation of parents that ever lived. We went to all the parental meetings. We went to all the events, all the games, we were very present in our kids’ lives. But we had a blind spot: The digital part of our kids’ lives. We spent five minutes analyzing that, and the years afterward condemning it. But we were wrong. Mats lived a much richer and better life than what we saw. He had friends, he knew love. He made an impact on people’s lives.
[The film] in a way, answered one of the big questions we had for 25 years: How could Mats, with the condition that he was brought into the world with and lived his 25 years here with, how could he keep his enthusiasm, his optimism, his happiness, and his curiosity? That was a puzzle for us until he died. It’s only in the 10 years after that his real story has been revealed to us.
GISKE It was always important to us to launch the film in Norwegian cinemas before the world launch [on Netflix], because Mats Steen’s story is so well known here and we really wanted to see the reaction. It was a huge success.
REE Some 120,000 Norwegians saw this film in theaters [for a box office of around $1.3 million].
GISKE We have five million people total in the country, so that’s a lot.
REE The best reactions I’ve gotten from showing the film in Norwegian cinemas is people coming up to me and saying: After watching your film, I want to go to my loved ones and give them a hug and tell them how much they mean to me. I’ve had gamers coming up to me, and teenagers telling me they want to take their parents to see the film.
GISKE Right after the launch, we put in some daytime screenings for seniors, and they sold out. All these seniors were watching the film because they wanted to understand what their grandchildren are up to online. And then they went back to the cinemas with their grandchildren to watch the film again. People understood that this is a film not just for gamers — it’s a story of friendship and community. It’s been exciting to see how it has reached all generations.
ROBERT STEEN I have been appointed by the Norwegian government to lead an expert group on how the digital environment impacts everyone from age zero to age 19 — In teaching, in socializing, with mental and physical health, everything. A lot of people are surprised a 62-year-old man can see the positive side of screen time. But Mats’ story has taught me that I was wrong. We have to admit we weren’t listening to the virtual stories of our children. We ignored them completely. And we were wrong.
Today in Norway, 80 percent of all children under 16 spend, on average, more than an hour every day in online gaming. 80 percent. It’s by far the biggest activity outside of school. And 80 percent of parents say that they either have either no interest or no understanding of what online gaming is all about. So our parents have no idea about one of the most important things their children are doing.
I hope one of the outcomes of the movie is that parents can have these discussions with their children [that we didn’t have with Mats]. When you peel back the layers of Mats’ story, and of the movie, it’s a story of hope and opportunity.
We had a 93-year-old man who saw the film in a cinema here in Oslo. He sent us an email and said: Mats had a superpower. His superpower was he made the most out of the life he was given. How many of us can say that we have made the most out of the life we were given?
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