January 1

It is January 1st, which means that I start the new Genre-ary event at EYG. This year, EYG will be doing the Genre-ary with documentaries. I will watch a new documentary, one that I have never seen before, every day for the whole month.

The first documentary I watched was one I saw on YouTube pundit Dan Murrell’s video of the Best Films of the Year. It was called The Remarkable Life of Ibelin and it sounded like an emotional film. I decided that I would use 2024 documentaries in the Genre-ary instead of waiting on them until the June Swoon.

With the set-up out of the way, The Remarkable Life of Ibelin was truly a beautiful documentary about a young man with Duchenne muscular dystrophy who was able to find friendship, love and hope inside the gaming world of World of Warcraft.

Mats Steen, a young Norwegian boy, was diagnosed with the muscular disorder as a child and had to spend most of his life confined to a wheelchair as the disorder slowly restricted his motor skills.

One of the few things Mats was able to do was be on his computer. He found a community or guild, inside World of Warcraft, called Starlight, where he was able to meet others. Mats did not reveal anything about his condition to the people playing the game with him even after they had formed a close online relationship.

The doc uses the actual online dialogue used in the game to create an animated model of the online game. It uses this animation, in the World of Warcraft style, to show how important Mats, as the avatar called Ibelin, would become to the Starlight guild. The doc also used interviews with other guild members and family members of Mats as well as some home movies to build this picture of the young man.

Mats wrote an online blog near the end of his life that the doc used to illustrate more about the thoughts Mats was having. They had an actor read the blog entries in a voice close to Mats. Mats’ family did not know anything of this blog and, after his death, Mats had left the password to his family. This is where they started to understand how much their son had impacted the world through the video game. They posted on the blog that Mats had died and dozens of people responded to them, one of the more powerful moments for me during this doc.

The doc was not about a man who was slowly dying. This doc showed the power of life, friendship and of connections to others, even if it is not in the typical way. Mats had a short life, but his presence was felt by many different people in extremely powerful ways.

This was available to stream on Netflix. It is well worth your time. You may give a second thought to the viability of those kids spending time on their computers.