Zoophiles

Last night I met my friend Mike to catch up. We met in Soho and had some snacks and just gossiped a little about what has been going on. He is a freelance photographer who does a lot of travel work so it hard to get time with him to sit down and see each other. Well he had asked me if I wanted to go see the new film Zoo at the IFC with him, I looked It up:

A hit at this year's Sundance Film Festival, this ravishing documentary sprang from a shocking true-life tale. In 2005, a businessman abandoned at an emergency room in rural Washington died from internal injuries, and the investigation into his death uncovered a nearby horse farm that hid a dark sexual secret. But ZOO is anything but lurid. Through impeccable camerawork and interviews with the exposed men, filmmaker Robinson Devor explores a hidden subculture forced into public view to craft a subdued, poetic and ultimately deeply compassionate portrait of people who live at society's outermost boundaries. The film explores the ensuing media coverage and public outcry that uncovered a secret community of zoophiles, who call themselves “zoos.” This expressionistic rendering of how apparently upstanding citizens banded together and videotaped their journey into the most taboo realms of behavior, reveals the enormous gulf between what we appear to be and who we really are.


Oddly enough I had seen the video that circled the Internet along side the story. It was one of those moments where friends come over to your apartment and grab the closest laptop to bring up a web site that you just have to see. So we watched one of the videos from this collective group of people, it was a video of this man known as “Mr. Hands” that this film is based around but it was not the video that killed him contrary to what everyone thought. It was painful to watch in all ways possible. My introduction to it then was very crude and one dimensional, it was only a sensationalist video that was the big sexually deviant 30 seconds going around. But watching Zoo last night totally changed my perceptive on it, I mean seriously change it. The move is very quiet and the cinematography is stunning, what the director had done was simple but had a huge impact. He had the people that were involved (the ranch hand, another individual who partook in this subset of sexual culture, and a few other key members) and he had them tell their stories over the scenic views of Washington State and actors reenacting that story as it was told. I was shocked it was the voices of the actual people not a script of what was thought to have happened. The way the material is approached allows for more of an understanding to it rather than a brush off of generalization of sick sexual prowess. I am not saying that I bonded or felt any affinity to them or what they and done but when you view their story in conjunction to the media and what had gone around via the internet and major new stations there is definitely a second side to the story. I would absolutely recommend going to this with an open mind, there are no sexual scenes other than a quick few seconds of them reviewing tapes found in the home where people would meet up from the internet to explore these ideas. Because of the content it feels weird to say, but this really was a very beautiful movie that I am glad I took the opportunity to see it.