'Zoo': where do we draw the sexual line?

From the Sundance Film Festival Documentary competition section.

In the predawn hours of July 2, 2005, a dying man was dropped off at a rural emergency room in the Pacific Northwest. A surveillance camera captured the license plate of the car that deposited the man at the hospital. This led detectives to a nearby horse farm, where they found hundreds of hours of videotape of men from all over the world having sex with Arabian stallions. The man's cause of death was a perforated colon.

Although this incident made headlines and the tabloid news, Zoo is the complete antithesis of what you expect. Robinson Devor's filmmaking is as smart as it is eloquent. 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. He cleverly captures the essence of these men and their alienation by creating a visual poetry. Read more