True/False 2024: Benjamin Ree’s heartwarming documentary Ibelin examines human life through a gamer’s lens

Courtesy Netflix

The True/False Film Festival is currently running in Columbia, MO. The nationally renowned event brings together many of the year’s most important upcoming documentaries and our film editor Abby Olcese is sharing highlights. Read this year’s other coverage here as it goes live. 

Mats Steen died of a degenerative muscular disease at age 25.

Throughout his brief life, his parents worried about their son’s lack of social interaction; he lived independently with the help of caretakers, but rarely left his apartment and spent most of his time gaming online.

The Steens knew Mats was sensitive and kind, but did anyone else?

It turns out Mats’ connection to others was stronger than most people knew. Before his death, Mats left behind his password information for his family to close his online accounts. What they found was a vibrant existence Mats had created for himself through World of Warcraft. Mats not only had friends, he was a beloved part of the WoW player community, known for his empathy and relational skills. After the family posted an update on Mats’ death to his blog, emails and tributes poured in from people across the globe who he’d impacted as his online character, Ibelin Redmoore.

Ibelin explores Mats’ life online and off through interviews with his family and WoW guild members, home video footage and recreated footage from the game based on gameplay transcripts and brought to life by voice actors.

Mats’ interactions with other players are animated as they would be when they were played in WoW. We see him help a woman and her autistic son connect to each other, and help a friend get her computer back from her parents so they can keep playing together. At one point, Mats set himself up as a “private investigator” within the game, essentially acting as therapist to anyone who had a real-world conflict they wanted to talk through.

Mats’ beautiful relationships with his online friends are an example of what gaming (and the internet) can do at its best—bring people together who otherwise wouldn’t have met. It’s also lovely to see Mats’ family react so strongly to learning that their son was so loved. When Mats’ WoW guild members are invited to participate in his funeral, it turns the event from a dour remembrance to a celebration of all that Mats was.

There is, however, an overwhelmingly positive angle to Ibelin that feels a little too saccharine, bordering on after-school-special vibes. Ree’s previous film, The Painter and the Thief, played with time and explored a complicated relationship in ambitious ways that Ibelin consciously does not.

Before the film’s premiere at True/False, Ree (introducing the film over Zoom) mentioned he’d known Mats in WoW before his death, and had gotten to know his family before making the film.

Knowing that going in helps explain the approach—it’s essentially a remembrance in service of a friend—but it puts some constraints on the film that keep it from being as strong as it could be. For many people, however (especially gamers and anyone involved in the games industry), this will be a small quibble.

Ibelin works best as a celebration of what we can do when we treat each other with the same compassion in online spaces as we do in everyday life. It’s an ode to the gaming experience and the lasting communities that experience builds. Even if you’d rather the film interrogate its subject a little more, you’d have to be made of stone not to shed some tears by the time the credits roll.