Benjamin Ree

Benjamin Ree (born July 10, 1989) is a Norwegian director and cinematographer of several documentaries, including Magnus (2016), The Painter and the Thief (2020), and Ibelin (2024).

Ree began making films at the age of eleven and studied Journalism at Oslo Metropolitan University. After his studies Ree worked as a freelance videojournalist for BBC and Reuters, most notably covering the 2011 Norway attacks. Ree has said in interviews that making his first feature Magnus was his film school: "There I understood that I could transfer the interviews to a universal, nonverbal cinematic language."

His debut film Magnus (2016) premiered at Tribeca Film Festival and was distributed to 64 countries. The film is a coming of age story about the world's best chess player Magnus Carlsen. His second feature film The Painter and the Thief (2020) was one of the opening films at Sundance Film Festival where it won a Special Jury Award for Creative Storytelling.[10] The film tells the story of an artist who befriends the thief who stole two of her paintings.[11] NEON bought the world rights to the film after the Sundance Film Festival premiere.[12]

Ree researched and directed the TV documentary series Conversion Therapy with Morten Hegseth (2019) which uncovers how religious groups are offering Conversion Therapy for gay people in Norway.[13] In the aftermath of the series the Prime Minister of Norway Erna Solberg said that she would stop the practice of conversion therapy in Norway: "We have to ensure that the abuses we have seen documented by VG do not happen in the future", she said.[14][15]

His third documentary feature film, Ibelin, premiered in competition at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the World Documentary Audience Award.[16] It was picked up for distribution by Netflix.

Ree is represented internationally by the production company and agency Anonymous Content.[17]