The Remarkable Life of Ibelin

The Remarkable Life of Ibelin (2024)

Ibelin

The secret life of a young World of Warcraft gamer is vividly reimagined when his online friends contact his family after his death.

Date of release
2024-03-08
TMDB
8.1 / 10 (166)
Runtime
1h 43m
Genres
Documentary, Animation
Director
Benjamin Ree

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Awards: 6 · Nominations: 0. Including: Sundance World Cinema Audience Award: Documentary; Sundance World Cinema Directing Award: Documentary; Tromsø International Film Festival's audience award; Dragon Award Best Nordic Documentary

The Remarkable Life of Ibelin is a 2024 Norwegian documentary film directed by Benjamin Ree. The film premiered, under its original title Ibelin, on 19 January 2024 at the Sundance Film Festival where it won two awards in the World Documentary Competition—the Audience Award and the Directing Award. The film also won a Peabody Award at the 85th Annual Peabody Awards.

Production

Benjamin Ree, the director of the film, first read about Mats Steen in a 2019 NRK article about Steen's life. After learning that his family had recorded home movies throughout Steen's life, Ree reached out to them about making a film. Steen was a member of a guild in World of Warcraft named Starlight, which had logged 42,000 pages of their text chats in the game. Ree was able to retrieve about 4,000 pages for the script.

Ree was researching, looking for ways to visualise Starlight's text chats when he discovered an animation studio ran by Rasmus Tukia and hired Tukia as an animator. Tukia had previously posted his fan-made World of Warcraft machinimas on YouTube. Most of the film's game animations were made and edited by Tukia using assets from World of Warcraft, but he collaborated with two other animators on "background characters, rigging and rendering".

World of Warcraft is created and owned by Blizzard Entertainment in Irvine, California. Ree and the producer, Ingvil Giske, did not contact them until three years into production, when the film was nearly finished. They were invited to screen the film at Blizzard's office, where they were given permission to "use whatever [they] need[ed]".

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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