The director of World of Warcraft documentary The Remarkable Life of Ibelin says it's 'a coming of age story': 'We're trying to capture a human being'
Earlier this week, Netflix started streaming The Remarkable Life of Ibelin. It's a documentary about Mats Steen, a Norwegian man who died at the age of 25 from Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a rare degenerative disorder. After his death, his parents—who'd feared that their son's disease had kept him from experiencing companionship—discovered that he'd lived a second life in World of Warcraft as the dashing rogue Ibelin, who spent 20,000 hours roleplaying alongside a close-knit guild of friends. Using in-game assets, the film captures moments from Mats Steen's time as Ibelin, reconstructing eight years of friendship, flirting, and connection from blog posts and archived roleplay transcriptions.
I spoke with Benjamin Ree, the documentary's director, to learn what it was about Mats Steen's story that resonated with him. Ree had first learned about Ibelin in 2019, thanks to a Facebook post from Steen's uncle—who, coincidentally, had been Ree's filmmaking teacher. While he thought it was an «extremely powerful, emotional story,» Ree said he hadn't initially had any thoughts of making it into a film. That changed, however, when he learned just how much of Steen's—and Ibelin's—life had been recorded.
«I called up Mats' uncle just to tell him how much that story meant to me, and he told me that his brother had filmed Mats' whole life from the day he was born,» Ree said. Not only that, but Steen's uncle said that Starlight—Ibelin's guild—had maintained a massive archive of transcribed roleplay interactions. «That was the moment I thought, 'Maybe it's possible to make a documentary here.'»
Steen's parents, however, were «very unsure if they wanted to be a part of a film,» Ree said, but they were looking to have their recordings of Mats' life digitized. Ree offered to handle the digitizing regardless of whether it'd lead to a documentary, and what followed was a moment of serendipity.
«The first footage I saw was of Mats as a baby. He was around 8 months old, and right beside
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