A fascinating portrait of Mark Hogancamp, who built an elaborate scale-model world in his backyard as a way to cope with the after-effects of a brutal beating. “Outsider art has never been as riveting – or as revealing.” — Now
An astounding movie, one of those tales of all-American oddness that just keeps flowering into weirder, richer territory.
Screened as part of NZIFF 2010
Marwencol 2010
“Outsider art has never been as riveting – or as revealing – as it is in Jeff Malmberg’s study of Mark Hogancamp, a Kingston, New York, man who has constructed an elaborate scale-model world in his backyard as a way to cope with the after-effects of a brutal beating that left him with brain damage and memory loss. Hogancamp’s fantasyland is Marwencol, a Belgian village where Germans and Americans can wait out the Second World War in peace; its unfolding narrative finds his avatar (Hank) dragged away by the SS and tortured until the local women rally to his rescue. When Hogancamp’s dynamic photographs come to the attention of a Greenwich Village art gallery, everything changes – and Malmberg probes even deeper into his subject’s complicated, wounded soul.” — Norman Wilner, Now
“Jeff Malmberg’s engrossing documentary examines Hogancamp’s unique merging of art and therapy… Marwencol has always survived its encounters with the hated SS. Can it survive its discovery by the art world?” — Pamela Troy, San Francisco International Film Festival