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‘The Remarkable Life of Ibelin’ Review: More Real Than Reality
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of New York Times
Posted: May 9th, 2025
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/24/movies/the-remarkable-lif...
Benjamin Ree’s “The Remarkable Life of Ibelin” ... is a rare and beautiful thing: a moving documentary that excavates the question of the “real” in a profoundly humanistic and unconventional way. [The film] is about Mats Steen, a Norwegian man who died in 2014 at the age of 25. Mats lived out his final years nearly immobilized, the result of being born with Duchenne muscular dystrophy. Mats left behind something for his family to find: the password to his blog. Robert and Trude, Mats’s mother, logged in to leave a note for any readers about his passing. What happened shocked them: They began to receive emails from people all over Europe, an outpouring of love and tribute to Mats, whom everyone called “Ibelin.” They were players in World of Warcraft, members of the same guild — or “community of friends,” as one participant puts it — which called itself Starlight. Mats played as a burly, friendly man he called Ibelin. Mats, as Ibelin, was involved in other players’ lives. A significant friend is Lisette, who lives in the Netherlands and met Mats in the game when they were both teenagers. Another is Xenia-Anni, a Danish mother who struggled to connect with her son Mikkel, in part because of his autism, until they met Mats in the game. Gaming wasn’t a distraction, but a life, a place where [Mats] could express all the complex parts of his personality that the physical world couldn’t accommodate. All of these people and many others tell Ree that they received wise advice from Ibelin that changed their lives. They built real friendships and had real fights and worried about one another.
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