Marwencol

Documentary about a man who rebuilt his life by creating a scale model of a Belgian WWII village in his backyard.

In April 2000 Mark Hogancamp was beaten into a coma by five men outside a bar. When health insurance stopped covering his therapy costs, he was forced to seek a cheaper form of rehabilitation and over the next couple of years his back-yard became home to a 1:6 scale rendering of a Belgian town called Marwencol, circa 1944. Employing an army of male and female dolls and a rigorous attention to detail, Hogancamp was able to weave his own traumatic experiences into an epic narrative of SS torturers and vampish witches, with his battle-scarred, cross-dressing alter ego at centre-stage.

This perfectly pitched documentary immerses you in one man’s world, “a society outside society”, and then explores what happened when Hogancamp’s images of Marwencol were lauded as outsider art.