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Zoo
Zoo movie poster
Directed by	Robinson Devor
Produced by	Peggy Case Alexis Ferris
Written by	Charles Mudede Robinson Devor
Starring	Richard Carmen Paul Eenhoorn Russell Hodgkinson John Paulsen
Cinematography	Sean Kirby
Editing by	Joe Shapiro
Distributed by	THINKFilm
Release date(s)	January 18, 2007 Theatrical: April 25, 2007
Running time	80 min.
Country	United States
Language	English
IMDb • Allmovie

Zoo, a film by The Stranger columnist Charles Mudede and director Robinson Devor, and executive producers Garr Godfrey and Ben Exworthy, is a documentary on the life and death of Kenneth Pinyan, a Seattle area man who died of peritonitis due to perforation of the colon after engaging in receptive anal sex with a horse. The film's public debut was at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2007, where it was one of 16 winners out of 856 candidates,¹ and played at numerous regional festivals in the USA thereafter.² Following Sundance, it was also selected as one of the top five American films to be presented at the prestigious Directors Fortnight sidebar at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival.³⁴

The director and festival shortlist producers describe the film as:

"The complete antithesis of what you expect ... To begin with, 'Zoo' is neither graphic nor exploitive. Most of it takes the form of recreations, but from the point of view of the men 'who met for years without disturbance in the shadows of Mt. Rainier,' as Devor puts it."⁵

"I aestheticized the sleaze right out of it." - Devor⁶

"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." - Devor, describing his interest in the film's subject. ⁷

The film was made with co-operation of the two men who took Pinyan to the hospital, as well as other friends of his, in the attempt to explore the life and death of the man, as well as those who came to the farm near Enumclaw for similar reasons, beyond the public understanding of the media. It does contain explicit material of sexual activities, but only in the view of video footage shown on a small television screen.

The Sundance judges called it a "humanizing look at the life and bizarre death of a seemingly normal Seattle family man who met his untimely end after an unusual encounter with a horse".

"They called us and were excited about the imagery, the poetry, the experimentation with the documentary form," says Charles Mudede, the film's writer and an editor at the alternative weekly The Stranger. [...] "It's unmentionable... And then strangely, suddenly, in 2005, it becomes the talk of society. How exactly does that happen? How do we go from something being utterly hidden from view, and then suddenly we're consumed with it and so upset by it we need to pass a law?" ¹

Title

The movie was originally titled In the Forest There Is Every Kind of Bird,⁸ but is released under the title Zoo, short for zoophile, signifying a person with a sexual interest in animals.

Awards and Recognition

Zoo was one of 16 documentaries selected, out of 856 submitted, for screening at the Sundance Film Festival.¹

It was also selected as one of the top five American films to be presented at the prestigious Directors Fortnight sidebar at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival.³⁴

Response

The Seattle Times called it "A tough sell that gets respect at Sundance"⁹, also noting the local economic effect of landmark films which put a location "on the map". IndieWire movies calls it "one of the most beautiful films of the year" and noted that "without sensation" it steps back to a "non-traditional" viewpoint and concludes that "Devor makes a persuasive, provocative and deeply profound case for tolerance and understanding in the face of the seemingly most incomprehensible of acts". OC Weekly film says, "Zoo achieves the seemingly impossible: It tells the luridly reported tale of a Pacific Northwest businessman's (who may have actually been an engineer for Boeing¹⁰) fatal sexual encounter with a horse in a way that’s haunting rather than shocking and tender beyond reason."¹¹ Similar views were expressed by the L.A. Times ("remarkably, an elegant, eerily lyrical film has resulted")⁶ and the Toronto Star, "gorgeously artful ... one of the most beautifully restrained, formally distinctive and mysterious films of the entire festival".¹²

Other reviewers criticized the film for breaching "the last taboo", or for sinking to new depths: "More compelling than the depths of man's degeneracy is our cultural rationalization of 'art,' whereby pushing the envelope is confused with genius and scuttling the last taboo is seen as an expression of sophistication." ¹³

Notes

See also

• Kenneth Pinyan
• Zoophilia
• Sundance Film Festival

External links

• The Sundance Film Festival home page

Wikipedia content modification information:

• This page was last modified on 2 January 2009, at 01:29.

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