By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 4.5 cats
Director: Benjamin Ree
Year: 2024
Running time: 106
IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt19811010/reference/
Val says: “This heart-soaring story of Mats ‘Ibelin’ Steen was excellently told by Benjamin Ree, who hit the archival jackpot with his chosen subject. Not only did Ree have access to extensive family videos, but footage from a professionally produced video featuring Mats’ use of his assistive devices in gaming, and exhaustive logs of every moment he spent online as Ibelin.
“Ree’s team was able to gain access to character models from World of Warcraft, and therefore could lovingly recreate Ibelin’s rich online life so that we could see firsthand how fully he lived, loved, and injected his chosen community with vibrance. What a wonderful and unique way to bring his story to life. Especially striking was the juxtaposition of Mats’ physical condition vs. the freedom he felt as his online persona – spending hours each day just running through the world of Azaroth.
Beyond the success of the technical storytelling of this piece, the form and editing took us beat by emotional beat through Mats’ parents eyes as they delighted in, grieved with, and then lost their son, with all of the complexities that come alongside the realization that your loved one never truly lived. And then the tape literally rewinds – and the story starts again, this time told through Mats’ words from his online blog. These two worlds that he inhabited as Mats and Ibelin were brought together through his parents’ journey, and told by those who he impacted and who loved him most.
As a gamer myself, I didn’t have much trouble adapting to the sometimes stilted animation and dialogue of the in-game recreations, but some of the awkwardness of interacting online still shows through and breaks some immersion in Mats’ story. I did really appreciate the focus on the real-life counterparts to Mats’ online friends, especially calling out the real ways their lives were changed from their interactions with him.
Though the emotional beats of the story felt a bit predictable at times, they were no less effective, and I was sobbing alongside most of the theater, feeling like the world was so much better for people like Mats and the digital worlds that allow them to bring their whole vibrant selves to bear for the good of all of us. 4.5 cats“