Benjamin Ree Latest Celebrity News & Gossip

Media representation of disabled people is challenging to get right — too saccharine, and you’re veering towards inspiration porn, too maudlin, and you’re implying that a disabled life might not be a life worth living. “Ibelin,” the newest documentary from “The Painter and the Thief” filmmaker Benjamin Ree, strikes a poignant balance, acknowledging the ways that physical disability can limit a life while showing how one complex man expanded his world nonetheless.

What’s the biggest documentary festival in the world? The International Documentary Festival Amsterdam. For now.

EXCLUSIVE: Sugarcane has become the latest big documentary deal out of the Sundance Film Festival.

Siddhant Adlakha Between fascist propaganda, harassment campaigns, AI-generated Google results, and the collapse of digital publishing, it’s hard not to think of the internet as a wasteland. “Ibelin,” however, is a defining film about the positive side of the modern web experience, and connections forged online.

Rebecca Rubin Film and Media Reporter Netflix has acquired “Ibelin,” a documentary that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Benjamin Ree (“The Painter and the Thief”) directed the film, which centers on a Norwegian gamer named Mats Steen, who died of a degenerative muscle disease at the age of 25. According to the official logline, “his parents mourned what they thought had been a lonely and isolated life, when they started receiving messages from online friends around the world.” “Many of my favorite documentary films and series of all time have been distributed by Netflix,” Ree said in a statement.

Addie Morfoot Contributor In “Ibelin” Norwegian filmmakerBenjamin Ree focuses on Mats Steen, a Norwegian gamer who died in 2014 of a degenerative muscular disease at age 25. Ree, who as a child was family friends with the Steen family, conceived of the project after reading a 2019 BBC article. The piece explains that after Mats’ death his parents discovered that they were all wrong about their son’s social life.

Alex Ritman Paris-based sales house Charades has acquired international sales rights to “In a Violent Nature,” the debut feature film from writer and director Chris Nash that is set to premiere in Sundance‘s Midnight Section on Jan. 22.

Lise Pedersen Norwegian filmmaker Benjamin Ree, whose previous film “The Painter and the Thief” picked up a host of awards including Best Storytelling at Sundance, has given Variety exclusive access to his new doc film project, “Ibelin,” at the Copenhagen Intl. Documentary Film Festival.The film is named after the “World of Warcraft” avatar of Mats Steen, a young Norwegian man who died at the age of 25 from DMD (Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy), a rare genetic disorder that causes muscle degeneration.After his death, Mats’ parents discovered that their disabled son, who for the last 10 years of his life had been wheelchair-bound and needed constant medical assistance, has led a rich and eventful life online and made friends around the world on the way.

As hooks go, The Painter and the Thief has a great one: The Oscar-shortlisted documentary, by 31-year-old Norwegian filmmaker Benjamin Ree, follows a friendship between a Czech painter and the tattooed gangster who stole two of her most valuable works from an Oslo art gallery. What begins as a caper with a twist, however, soon reveals itself to be a much deeper rumination on things like friendship, self-destructiveness and the artistic impulse.

The Neon documentary The Painter and the Thief begins with a surprising “meet cute.” After two paintings are stolen from artist Barbora Kysilkova in Oslo, Norway, she encounters one of the suspected thieves in court. Instead of feeling angry at the accused, Karl-Bertil Nordland, he excites her compassion, and an unlikely friendship develops between them.

Czech artist Barbora Kysilkova was as surprised as anyone when she received a phone call in 2015 informing her that thieves had stolen two of her paintings from a gallery in Oslo, Norway.

Anthony D'Alessandro Editorial Director/Box Office EditorNEON, StudioCanal, and Blueprint Pictures are co-developing the narrative remake of lauded documentary The Painter and the Thief from Benjamin Ree.NEON held a bidding war for the project, which StudioCanal and Blueprint won.

The surprising and provocative documentary “The Painter and the Thief” is best not watched by more than one person at the time. After all, it is opening during the pandemic as a ‘Virtual Cinema’ release.

By Dino-Ray Ramos

The Painter and the Thief trailer has arrived online. The documentary comes to the screen by Benjamin Ree and will start to run out on demand from 22nd May.

Neon on Monday said that it has acquired worldwide rights to The Painter and the Thief, a documentary directed by Benjamin Ree that had its world premiere at Sundance where it won the world cinema documentary special jury prize for creative storytelling.

By Tom Grater

Incredible. That’s the word that comes to mind with Benjamin Ree’s “The Painter and the Thief,” a stranger-than-fiction friendship story in which vérité techniques produce unbelievable results.