When a film hits me as hard as Benjamin Ree’s “Ibelin” did at Sundance, I tend to take a while to write about it: You need time to unwrap the ball of emotion whose center turned you to tears. “Ibelin” is a special film. It begins with a prototypical frame: A Norwegian family has recently lost their son Mats Steen after a long battle with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a degenerative muscular disease that slowly paralyzed Mats before eventually taking his life at 25-years old. Throughout Mats’ life, his parents worried about his solitary existence, his only outlet being gaming, specifically and most intensely, World of Warcraft. It was only after his parents published a post to his blog announcing his death that they discovered his rich online life.
Though you expect “Ibelin” to take the tired path of parents working to understand their son without the presence of their son, Ree’s documentary takes several galvanizing swerves. The film first combs through family home movies of Mats, using a narrator whose voice closely resembles Mats to read the autobiographical blog posts he left behind on his website. Just when we have a handle on Ree’s approach, he reworks his frame. Through archives of conversations and gameplay, along with the help of the makers of World of Warcraft, Ree recreates Mats’ very real virtual life. He also interviews the many people on the platform who were touched by him too. The comprehensive vision grants a picture of Mats’ personhood, from his first love to his many joys, his self-loathing and understandable fear, avoiding what could have easily slipped into becoming an ableist trauma picture.
Ree’s storytelling is intuitive and tight, while the animation and graphics—which often left me thinking about “We Met in Virtual Reality,” a film that told the story of how trans and nonbinary people and those on the spectrum found freedom through gaming avatars—is immersive and inventive. By the end of “Ibelin,” a work that left much of True/False’s Missouri Theatre sniffling, we’re not so much crying for Mats—we’re reduced to our raw nerves because of the touching life that is shown.
“Alien Island” by director Cristóbal Valenzuela Berríos is a dense black and white shot oddity. When I first watched it out of the Chicago International Film Festival, I was struck by how seamlessly it blended true-crime with conspiracy theories, odes to the “Twilight Zone” with a country’s caustic political history. It’s why I’m grateful I got to watch it again at True/False, this time in a theater, in a space called the Globe that usually serves as a church. The ethereal meaning of the setting, for many reasons, felt fitting considering the extraterrestrial happenings of Berríos’ slippery documentary.