Director Benjamin Ree On Drawing Inspiration From Faulkner, Dostoyevsky & Virginia Woolf For Oscar Contender ‘The Remarkable Life Of Ibelin’

deadline.com:

For his Oscar-contending documentary The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, filmmaker Benjamin Ree drew inspiration from literary sources as much or more than cinematic ones. “One of my main interests is dramaturgy… and structure,” he says over a breakfast of an omelet and waffles in Amsterdam. “I’m obsessed with that, and I’ve been studying that my whole life.” In his Netflix film, Ree explores the journey of Mats Steen, a young Norwegian man with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a terminal condition that causes progressive weakening of the heart and skeletal structure.

Despite the physical limitations caused by the disorder, Mats lived a rich life in the online World of Warcraft game – where his avatar was the powerfully built, able-bodied Ibelin.

In that setting, Mats made many friends and impacted people far and wide, but his parents had no idea of their son’s vibrant virtual experiences until after his passing at the age of 25. “The whole idea here is to find a structure that says something about grief,” Ree says of the narrative challenge. “And it does have what I call a symphonic, circular structure.

And when I say symphonic, I mean that we tell the story like five to six times. [Initially], it’s basically told in the opening credits.