Bestiality in Suburbia: Zoo — Jan 23rd 2007

By Karina Longworth

Early one morning in 2005, a dying man was unceremoniously dropped off at a hospital in Enumclaw, WA, a small town 45 miles outside of Seattle. Hours later, the man, who was carrying no identification, died from internal bleeding caused by a perforated colon. Security camera footage of the car that dropped the man at the hospital led authorities to a horse farm. There they found "buckets full" of video tapes documenting men having sex with horses. The farm was apparently a meeting spot for an online community of zoophiles (they call themselves "zoos"), who would gather to drink daiquiris, watch science fiction films, and engage in sexual intercourse with Arabian stallions. The regular visitors to the farm knew one another by their online screen names. The dead man's name was Mr. Hands.

The incident became a major media event in the Pacific Northwest, and videos confiscated from the farm eventually made their way online. Since there is no law against bestiality in Washington, none of the men who operated and frequented the ranch were charged with a crime. They did, however, come in for their share of public humiliation. Now those men are telling their side of the story, in Seattle-based filmmaker Robinson Devor's Sundance Documentary Competition entry, Zoo.

Devor incorporates audio interviews with regular visitors to the ranch, as well as reenactments of (non-sexual) events, many featuring the actual participants. "We had no interest in regurgitating what was already out there," Devor told Netscape News, referring to the tabloid TV and Internet exposure. "It was difficult. Just getting [the participants] to talk openly was a challenge because we were 'The Media'. And 'The Media' was bad for a lot of people involved. Some of them would have preferred to have seen a hard-line, 60 Minutes sort of documentary expose. But that's not what we do as filmmakers."
Anyone anticipating a kinky session with Mister Ed will walk out of Zoo disappointed. And what about more high-minded cineastes? After a week of sniggering references to the "the horse-f**king movie," the Sundance press corps denied Zoo the customary round of applause. Yet it's worth noting that a handful of major critics have so far reviewed it favorably. And the film is visually stunning, shot with a hazy, fairy-tale glow by cinematographer Sean Kirby. There's only a glimpse of zoophilia in action: some grainy, primarily out-of-frame television footage. In lieu of graphic imagery, Devor relies heavily on metaphor to pad out his story--sometimes several metaphors piled into one shot.

The conflict between the public and private lives of Mr. Hands--the man who died at the suburban hospital--is of great interest to the filmmaker. During the week, Mr. Hands was a divorced father of a young son, living alone in a Seattle high-rise and making a more-than-adequate living working for a defense contractor. His weekends on the farm functioned as an escape from a lifestyle that he had come to find suffocating. Like other zoophiles who describe their fetish in the film, he was attracted to the idea of physical intimacy divorced from an anxiety-plagued human relationship.

"Mr. Hands was such an interesting character," says Devor. "This was a guy who was a conservative man at one point, and those ideas started breaking down for him. I think that 9/11 triggered a lot of it. But he was [also] in the center of one of the most secretive military complexes. Meanwhile, he listened to a lot of left-wing radio, he questioned everything our government was involved in, and he was ethically conflicted about his job and the money he was making. That's the core fascination for me."

Zoo is the rare independently-produced documentary to arrive at Sundance with theatrical distribution. "We came in towards the end, provided some finishing funds, but they were basically on their way," says Erin Owens, Director of Marketing for ThinkFilm. Owens is currently booking the film at various festivals; she says the company is going to take some time to gauge the general reaction before setting a release date.

The distribution company may have reason to worry. Surely some viewers will be turned off by the director's refusal to clearly condemn or condone the lifestyle at the center of Zoo. But Devor is adamant about the film's neutrality. Drawing a moral, he says, is "too one-dimensional, too easy. Everyone's going to want their own agenda, stated clearly. That we cannot give them, because then we're just a mouthpiece. That's not our job."

Tags: documentary, horses, netscape reports, NetscapeReports, robinson devor, RobinsonDevor, sundance, sundance film festival, SundanceFilmFestival, thinkfilm, zoo, zoophilia

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