Documentary on bestiality premieres at Sundance Film Festival

Sun-Sentinel ^ | 1/21/07 | Kenneth Turan

[kiriath_jearim]

PARK CITY, Utah -- "Zoo" is a documentary about what director Robinson Devor accurately characterizes as "the last taboo, on the boundary of something comprehensible." But remarkably, an elegant, eerily lyrical film has resulted.

"Zoo," premiering before a rapt audience Saturday night at Sundance, manages to be a poetic film about a forbidden subject, a perfect marriage between a cool and contemplative director (the little-seen "Police Beat") and potentially incendiary subject matter: sex between men and animals. Not graphic in the least, this strange and strangely beautiful film combines audio interviews (two of the three men involved did not want to appear on camera) with elegiac visual re-creations intended to conjure up the mood and spirit of situations. The director himself puts it best: "I aestheticized the sleaze right out of it."

Devor and his writing partner, Charles Mudede, live in Seattle and were stunned, as were many in the state, by a story that broke in 2005 about a local man who died after having sex with an Arabian stallion. Though bestiality is not illegal in Washington, the subsequent revelation of the existence of an Internet-based zoophile community (the men refer to themselves as "zoos," hence the title) was a shock.

Though there was the inevitable tabloid fuss, what Devor called "the prurient spectacle," the filmmaker was also "shocked that nobody did an in-depth look at this, that there was no investigative reporting rounding the story out with the psychology involved. I thought, 'This is an opportunity.' "

[Gay State Conservative]

I,then a naive kid from the suburbs of Boston,did my Army BCT in the late 60's in a company that was made up almost entirely of guys from TN,MS and TX.The guys from Texas would tell me that their first...ahem..."experience" was with livestock.

I never figured out if these guys were pulling my leg or not.

[narses]

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[This Just In]

Buddy, chances are, being a kid from Boston, they were messing with you. Don't forget, the man who died after experiencing a
stallion lived in Washington.

[SF Republican]

They don't call em "cowpokes"for nuthin I think (yuk) that fella with the colon problem was on the receiving end of that Arabian Stallion

[Crawdad]

OH!!

The stallion did HIM!!

Now I get it!

[Cicero]

I don't think there's anything wrong with posting an article like this. If it's made it to the Sundance Festival, then that means we've crossed one more line in the sand, from Brokeback Mountain to Zoo.

As for the review itself, no, "aesthetized" sleaze is still sleaze. You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear no matter how much you pretty it up. In fact, it's only more sickening when you realize what you are looking at.

[Emmett McCarthy]

"Brokeback Kennel" will no doubt be a big hit.

Keep thinking about that joke where the gal is explaining the rug burns on her knees. The one where the punch line is, "what? and have that dog breathing in my face?"