Im obsessed with that, and Ive been studying that my whole life.
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.
Benjamin Ree, director of ‘The Remarkable Life of Ibelin’Kristoffer Kumar/Elevation Pictures
[Initially], its basically told in the opening credits.
Mats gets this stream of consciousness montage kind of form.
Then the film suddenly becomes an animated film.
Mats Steen in ‘Ibelin’Bjørg Engdahl/Netflix
Its told through Ibelin…
The last time we tell this story, at the funeral, is told verbally.
Some of it is inspired by the structure fromAbsalom, Absalom!by William Faulkner, he reveals.
That [novel] is told many times from different perspectives.
Further inspiration came from an analysis of another Faulkner classic.
And then the last chapter is a third person narrator that sees everything…
The idea of having different kind of viewpoints, we do that inThe Remarkable Life of Ibelin.
And the last scene is at the funeral and then its told from a third-person view.
A unique story needs a unique form, the filmmaker observes.
Thats a coming-of-age story.
He adds, Theres a section where time passes by.
We are rewinding it, but 10 years passes by very, very quickly.
So, its all of these formal ideas.
A lot of them I take from literature.
The rewinding of the tapes is very inspired byTo the Lighthouseby Virginia Woolf.
Another author Ree reveres the famed Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
One of my favorite books of all time isThe Brothers Karamazov.
And how that is structured is super interesting…
It feels very free in the storytelling, he says.
In a lot of forced dramaturgy, you know where the story will go.
So thats the idea.
And its not always easy to do that in film because you have shorter time.
The film has been a big hit there.
Its like 4 percent of our population of people over 10 years old, he notes.
In Norway, I met teenagers that came up to me after screenings.
A 15-year-old said, I dont have any friends in real life.
Now I can show it to my parents, and they will understand my life better.
And I think that makes the audience resonate and understand.
Theres many different ways of understanding.
you could understand something more emotionally by watching a film than reading something about it.
