“Before our son Mats died, he left us his password,” the Norwegian gamer’s parent says in the opening of “Ibelin,” Benjamin Ree’s new Sundance documentary. “We believe that was intentional.”
And from those fateful words the life of Mats Steen, an ill-fated young man who died at age 25 from Duchenne muscular dystrophy in 2014, starts to play out before us. In the eyes of his family, Mats’ life was one of isolation, loneliness and longing. The disease eating away at his muscle tissue and robbing him of a healthy man’s strength eventually left him in wheelchair and reliant on feeding tubes.
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