Cinema 10 continues season with 'Marwencol' at Potsdam Roxy Monday

POTSDAM – Cinema 10 continues its Spring 2011 season Monday, April 11 with a screening of Marwencol, a 2010 USA documentary about the backyard fantasy world created as a form of therapy by a mentally disabled man.

Cinema 10 films screen on Mondays at 7:15 p.m. at the Roxy Theatre in Potsdam.

Tickets are $3.50 individual/$25 season tickets for students and seniors, and $4.50 individual/$35 season tickets for general admission.

In early 2000, Mark Hogancamp was attacked and beaten by five men outside a bar in Kingston, N.Y., which left him with serious brain trauma and the loss of most of his memory.

After emerging from a coma, Hogancamp was unable to pay for all the therapy he needed. Instead, he created a 1/6th scale World War II era fantasy world in his backyard that he called Marwencol.

Through building the town, staging battles and other events, and then photographing them, Hogancamp completed his own unorthodox forms of physical and psychological therapy.

Eventually the art world took notice, and Hogancamp was forced to decide if he was ready to leave Marwencol and re-enter the real world as the newest star of outsider art.

Ty Burr of the Boston Globe calls Marwencol a “strange and very beautiful documentary about the gray area between obsession and art.”