The Cinema Guild have picked up the distrib rights to Jeff Malmberg’s Marwencol — a docu film which premiered at the 2010 South by Southwest Film Festival where it won the Grand Jury Award for Best Documentary Feature. Cinema Guild will put the doc on their Fall slate, but before that the company will let the film continue on its winning ways on the film fest circuit this Summer.
If you don’t feel like going through the synopsis below, you can listen to the director sort of revealing the idea and the process he employed after the jump below. On April 8, 2000, Mark Hogancamp was attacked outside of a bar in Kingston, NY, by five men who beat him literally to death. Revived by paramedics, Mark had suffered brain damage and physical injuries so severe even his own mother didn’t recognize him. When he emerged from his coma nine days after the attack he could barely walk, speak or remember anything from his previous life. Less than a year later, Mark’s state-supported physical, cognitive and occupational therapies ran out. He was 38, broke, living in a trailer and unable to work. And he was angry. He realized he had two choices: he could give up and “let those five guys win,” or he could take control of his own recovery.
