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Mats Steen, a Norwegian gamer, died of a degenerative muscular disease at the age of 25. His parents mourned what they t | dG1fUS00YWl1OVMtSkk
Transcript
00:00 [Music]
00:04 Hello, my name is Benjamin Rie and I'm the director of the film Ibelin.
00:09 It plays in World Documentary Competition section at Sundance 2024.
00:15 The film is about Mats Sten.
00:18 He was born with a muscular disease called Duchenne.
00:21 It's a degenerative muscular disease that gradually makes the muscles weaker.
00:26 For the last 10 years of his life he was gaming all the time.
00:31 And that was the biggest sorrow for his parents because they believed that he had lived a very lonely and isolated life without any friends.
00:42 So when he passed away at the age of 25, his parents was in a deep sorrow.
00:49 But then suddenly they began receiving emails from all over Europe telling totally different stories about their son.
00:58 Because he had lived an eventful life inside a game.
01:02 In this film we are recreating Mats' avatar life.
01:08 Mats and his friends use programs to transcribe all their dialogue, all the events, all their diaries.
01:15 Which makes up 42,000 pages of an online archive.
01:21 That archive is possible to recreate with animation based upon real characters, real dialogue, real events.
01:31 We have used voice actors to make the animation come alive.
01:36 So we have made an animated film within the film which is a coming of age story of who Mats was in this virtual world.
01:45 Mats' parents and my parents were friends back in the 90s.
01:50 So I knew that there was a chance that Mats and I were in a photo together.
01:56 So when I began making this film I opened the family photo album and there was a picture of Mats and me in a playpen.
02:04 He was seven days older than me.
02:06 We both experienced a generational gap between our parents who were non-gamers and us that were gamers.
02:16 They didn't quite understand it that well.
02:18 So with this film we really hope that we can invite the audience and include them to experience what kind of life Mats lived inside the game World of Warcraft.
02:28 And what kind of impact he had there.
02:32 [Music]
02:44 [Music]