Anyone who’s ever found solace in an online community will have no trouble at all putting themselves in the shoes of Mats Steen, a young Norwegian man born in 1989 and the subject of the new Netflix documentary The Remarkable Life of Ibelin.
Ibelin is the name of the World of Warcraft character that Steen used for years to interact with fellow gamers, in a digital world where his disability — suffering from Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a genetic condition that chipped away at his ability to move and breathe — didn’t matter. In real life, the disease that would eventually kill him at 25 left him isolated and immobile. But playing Warcraft allowed him to cheat the life that had cheated him; in the game world, he had a network of friends. He could flirt. He could display empathy and offer advice, at one point helping a mother and her son.
He could wander around the fantasy land, taking it all in.
“The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, a documentary by filmmaker Benjamin Ree, takes a posthumous deep dive into Steen’s digital life, interviewing his best friends and competitors and plumbing the Steens’ own archives,” Netflix explains about the film, which arrives on Oct. 25. “The film takes us on a journey through the breadth of Mats Steen’s adventurous online life, introducing us to Ibelin, his charismatic World of Warcraft persona, and underscores how community and soulful relationships can transcend the boundaries of the physical world.”
When Mats’ parents signed into the blog that he’d kept for years to announce his death, they were gobsmacked to learn what an extensive life he’d led online and were quickly inundated with messages from the friends he’d made. Making the film even more of a heartfelt tribute to Mats is the way filmmaker Benjamin Ree worked with animators to use models taken directly from the game, an attempt to show viewers exactly what Mats would have seen as he played the game starting in 2004 through 2014 (the year he died).
In the game world of Azeroth, Mats once wrote on his blog, “my chains are broken. And I can be whoever I want to be.”
The beautiful irony of this Netflix gem, from the perspective of Mats’ parents, is that they’d spent much of his life regretting that he’d never get to experience the joys of friendship, finding love, or making a difference in someone’s life. By reconstructing his gameplay, interviewing people who gamed with him, and narrating entries from his blog, his parents come to learn just how wrong they were — that friendship and love are so much bigger than we realize.
