After being brutally attacked outside a bar and recovering from a coma and extensive physical injuries, Mark Hogancamp suffered brain damage and nearly total memory loss. Unable to afford therapy, he spent the next few years building a scale model, World War II-era town, Marwencol, populated with dolls, where he lived out his fantasy life, and which he documented in photographs. When his photographs were discovered by an art magazine, a New York gallery invited him to show his work, forcing him to choose between his self-contained world and the larger world from which he had retreated.