The Remarkable Life of Ibelin

Mats Steen was born with Duchenne muscular dystrophy and died at twenty-five. His family believed he had lived a solitary life, without friends, dying in his room playing computer games. After the funeral a message arrived at the address on his blog; then people wrote from all over Europe. All of them knew Mats and none of them had ever seen him. The subject is not illness but a family learning about their child's life after his death. Mats had lived for years inside a game world; he had friends, fell in love, quarrelled and made up. His family knew none of it. The form rests on two sources. On one side are present-day accounts from the family and his friends; on the other, his life in the game reconstructed in animation. Those sequences are not invented: his blog and the guild's archive preserved the exchanges as thousands of pages of record, and the scenes were staged directly from those texts. It was made by Benjamin Ree, who read about the case on a news site in 2019 and contacted the family. It won both the directing and the audience awards in the world documentary competition at Sundance in 2024 and was then released on Netflix. Who it is for: viewers who think about internet communities and disability. Who it is not for: anyone wanting to watch from a distance; the last section is genuinely heavy.