In the spring of 2000, Mark Hogancamp left his home in Kingston, NY and returned 2 months later as General Patton’s drinking buddy. Beaten so savagely one night at a bar that doctors feared he may never recover, he emerged from hospital a man without memories. Hogancamp was brain-damaged and – with his Medicare treatment cut off – left to find his place in a strange and frightening world. In time, he would find that place in Marwencol, Belgium.

Some people hide in their work, and others in their vices. For Mark, there is a model town. In his backyard he has built a world within a world, an Airfix retreat into a make-believe town he calls Marwencol. Populating the plywood community with avatars of the few people he can still remember, Mark begins a journey of child-like discovery. “The only man in town, with 27 Barbies” he beams, fixing the jacket of his miniature hero. It looks a little like Nicholas Cage, and he saves the women of the town from a marauding SS patrol, basking later in the adulating crowd of plastic fantastics.

“The Ruined Stocking Catfight club” he explains, “is the only one in Belgium”. Tiny glasses are carefully aligned as the smoky tavern fills with the town’s porcelain residents, the leggy blondes flirting with soldiers on shore-leave while Patton props up the bar. A small sign on the wall set out the rules; “None of the contestants are injured!” it reassures us. Everything here feels wholesome, and if the thousands of auteur pictures Mark has taken of Marwencol are art, then it’s art of the purest kind. There is no agenda to his work, no subversion. The editor of a local magazine observes that similar cult offerings have “a kind of wink-wink about how clever I am”, but that this is different. There’s no irony here, he reflects. “It’s a very authentic feeling, and you don’t see that very often.”

Hogancamp gives life to a world of his own creation in which he sits at once as hero, villain, lover and fighter. On the rare occasion he leaves his yard, he walks with caution along Kingston’s winding roads, dragging along a small plastic vehicle on a string. He looks down at the soldiers in the Jeep and knows they’ll protect him. They, like so much of his hobby, are mirrors of something more. Dressed in uniforms and placed in curious settings, they nonetheless bare the hallmarks of that fateful night at the bar. Mark looks wistfully at an early photo in which sworn enemies come together to toast their fated existence. “The British, the Germans: they all drank together, they all smoked cigarettes together. Everyone got along, no one was against anyone else. It didn’t matter what clothing they wore.”

This is Mark’s therapy. He laments having no one to talk to, mindful of his disappearance into an elaborate fantasy: bustling streets and bucolic expanses, good-time girls standing shoulder-to-should with war criminals and a crimson witch of the west. He tells a story of how his plastic incarnation came to be gagged and bound by the SS, who coldly slashed his ceramic face to mirror the scars on his real one. Like a skeevy exploitation, the women of the town arrive just in time to lay waste to his Nazis captors and save the day. Sighing, he picks up Anna, a Matel favourite. “Her saving me proved that she loves me; that she feels the same about me as I do about her”. On March 26th they marry before a congregation of GI Joes. His real wedding video rings out as the happy couple pose in front of quartered prisoners of war.

His insular life comes to a crossroads when a neighbour makes the time to stop and talk to this middle-aged Walter Mitty, never without a bundle of toy soldiers. Fascinated, he offers to curate a show in New York, and envisages canvas reproductions of Mark’s photos, each a depiction of a surreal, staged moment from the history of Marwencol. For Mark, the offer comes with a profound sense of loss and detachment. Scuffing his shoes on the pavement, he panics about what to wear, or whether he’ll fit in. Moreover, he fears what will become of exposing a world that has protected and nurtured him for so long. “I built Marwencol for my therapy. Now everyone wants to be part of it.”

The question of whether to promote his work is neither the films focal point nor an irrelevance. True, it represents the promise of tangible human connection, the only kind that can truly give back. But the film is less about what’s to come than what it took to get there. Mark is an extraordinary soul, and Marwencol is the touching and poetic journey of how a man might happen to rebuild his life. It’s Lars and the Real Girl writ small in 1:6 miniatures, a documentary wholly unlike anything you’ve seen before. This is a melancholy ode to the most damaging of afflictions: insufferable, unending loneliness. It’s a film that belongs to anyone who ever wanted for more. It’s a tribute to the given-ups, the ignored and the maligned. Most of all, it’s a dedication to the life and times of Mark Hogancamp, beatnik dreamer and survivor, and everything they couldn’t take away.