Marwencol

Marwencol (2010) is an American documentary you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Jeff Malmberg. Mark Hogancamp was beaten outside a bar and left for dead. He survived, but the attack destroyed his memory and left him with permanent brain damage — and no money for medical rehabilitation.

So he built a town. In his backyard, at one-sixth scale: a Belgian village set in 1944, populated by action figures and dolls he dressed, named and photographed in elaborate scenarios. He called it Marwencol. When the photography journal Esopus ran his images, the outside world took notice — and what had started as private survival became something harder to label. Malmberg stays close to Hogancamp without editorializing; the film is stranger and more affecting for it. One of the most genuinely unusual portraits of outsider art and psychological recovery in American documentary. Stream Marwencol (2010) online on iFILM.