PEN Picks: Miriam Toews presents Marwencol at the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema
PEN Picks presented in partnership with Hot Docs
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Fiction meets fact as some of our most celebrated writers present a documentary of their choice. Each author will discuss their personal interest in the film after the screening, and will participate in a Q&A with the audience. These events will give audiences unprecedented access and insight into the processes, preoccupations, and motivations of Vincent Lam, Camilla Gibb, Miriam Toews, and Linwood Barclay.
Governor General Fiction Award winner Miriam Toews is the third of four authors in the PEN Pick series presented in partnership with Hot Docs.
The Bloor Hot Docs Cinema
Monday, March 24, 2014
6:15 p.m.
Individual tickets and series passes will be on sale through the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema box office.
Full list of events:
Vincent Lam (February 10)
Camilla Gibb (March 3)
Miriam Toews (March 24)
Linwood Barclay (April 14)
Co-presented with the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema
Miriam Toews is the author of five previous bestselling novels: Summer of My Amazing Luck, A Boy of Good Breeding, A Complicated Kindness (Canada Reads 2006, Canada Reads Canadian Bestseller of the Decade 2010), The Flying Troutmans, and Irma Voth, and one work of non-fiction, Swing Low: A Life. Her newest work of fiction, All My Puny Sorrows, will be released this April. She is a winner of the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, the Libris Award for Fiction Book of the Year, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and the Writers Trust Marian Engel/Timothy Findley Award. She lives in Toronto.
I chose Marwencol because it’s a profoundly moving story about art and suffering and memory and about the lengths an individual will go to to survive and to make sense of his or her world. Mark Hogancamp creates an intricate fictional town to deal with his emotions and pain that is vividly alive. The film is strange and beautiful and incredibly inspiring.
Marwencol
D: Jeff Malmberg | USA | 2010 | 83 min | PG
After being beaten into a brain-damaging coma by five men outside a bar, Mark builds a 1/6th scale World War II-era town in his backyard. Mark populates the town he dubs “Marwencol” with dolls representing his friends and family and creates life-like photographs detailing the town’s many relationships and dramas. Playing in the town and photographing the action helps Mark to recover his hand-eye coordination and deal with the psychological wounds of the attack. When Mark and his photographs are discovered, a prestigious New York gallery sets up an art show. Suddenly Mark’s homemade therapy is deemed “art”, forcing him to choose between the safety of his fantasy life in Marwencol and the real world that he’s avoided since the attack.
Headshot photo credit: Carol Loewen