|
VANCOUVER PREMIERE // VANCITY THEATRE EXCLUSIVE
"...a breathtakingly original nonfiction work" - Scott Foundas, VARIETY
"Zoo is a cool sensibility married to a hot topic, a poetic film about a forbidden, unsettling subject." - Kenneth Turan, LOS ANGELES TIMES
"I can't believe I'm thinking about this stuff, but weirdly grateful to Zoo for going there." - Nathan Lee, VILLAGE VOICE
Robinson Devor's Zoo-written, like his Police Beat, with Seattle alt-weekly critic and columnist Charles Mudede-achieves the seemingly impossible: It tells the luridly reported tale of a Pacific Northwest businessman's fatal sexual encounter with a horse in a way that's haunting rather than shocking, and tender beyond reason. So, too, it's hard to imagine a more cinematic film of this incident than Devor's suitably crossbred doc-cum-docudrama, which weds the audio testimonies of the dead man's zoophilic companions to speculatively re-enacted, dreamlike visuals that feature both professional actors and real-life subjects-Arabian stallions included. Zoo...might well be the ultimate subculture movie. The 2005 Enumclaw Horse Sex Incident, as the story was known in newsprint, involved a secret community of a half-dozen men who conversed online and gathered periodically at a rural farm outside Seattle to practice and sometimes videotape bestiality...Disarmingly quiet and contemplative, challenging both itself and the viewer to sympathize with a rather different breed of animal lover, Zoo is the opposite of exploitation. -Rob Nelson, Cinema Scope
The Seattle-based director found the basis for ZOO only a few miles from home, in the neighboring town of Enumclaw, Washington. It was there, in July of 2005, that a 45 year-old Boeing executive named Kenneth Pinyan was anonymously delivered to the hospital emergency room with a perforated colon. When he later died from massive internal bleeding, the ensuing investigation led police to a nearby farm where they discovered a bucket full of videotapes, including several showing Pinyan having sex with an Arabian stallion. Not only was this unthinkable act a regular practice of the deceased, it was clear from the other tapes that Pinyan had been part of a group that gathered frequently to perform - and record - similar acts. While many of the members were identified, (including the two cohorts who belatedly brought Pinyan to the hospital), no charges were filed because bestiality wasn't illegal in Washington at the time.
This local scandal soon became national news, with the media uncovering, then picking over, every aspect of Pinyan's life. The sole note of journalistic discretion was that Pinyan's name was never mentioned out of deference to the ex-wife and the son he was revealed to have had. Instead, he was exclusively referred to as "Mr. Hands," the online moniker he used when posting videos of himself having sex with stallions. Those extremely explicit tapes spread like wildfire over the internet after his death, exposing a previously hidden world. Ironically, it was the internet that united Pinyan's secret band of zoophiles - men who have an erotic attraction to animals and who call themselves "zoos." Initial shock gave way to curiosity, and the "Enumclaw horse sex incident," as it came to be known, became the subject of much dark humor in print, on the airwaves, and especially online, where the footage was virally "shared" as if it were another celebrity sex tape, albeit a highly deviant one. Moralists expressed outrage, animal rights activists conveyed concern, but sniggering humor proliferated, as it often does when a particular situation creates discomfort. The "horse sex case" became a pornographic joke. What somehow got overlooked was that Kenneth Pinyan, the notorious "Mr. Hands," was beyond embarrassment or shame. Kenneth Pinyan was dead.
Precisely because the "tabloid" version of Pinyan's story was so widespread, especially in Robinson Devor's home state, where the high titillation factor made the stories about the case the most-read articles in the Seattle Times' history, the filmmaker decided to take the opposite tack when preparing to tell his version of the story. Acknowledging that zoophilia "is the last taboo, on the boundary of something comprehensible," he decided that rather than gawk at the "zoos" from the outside, he would try to enter their world. Fed up with what he calls "the prurient spectacle," Devor recalls "that nobody had done an in-depth look at this, that there was no investigative reporting rounding the story out with the psychology involved. "There was a lot of laughter surrounding his death and we decided not to laugh but, rather, to approach his death, his life, his dreams, with a sense of gravity, a sense of the heaviness of the human condition. We took it seriously." Trying to find a way to access the inner life of Kenneth Pinyan, who, Devor reminds us, "was not an alien, he was a human being," he asked the questions: "What did this human do with his only life? And, ultimately, what does this particular human life tell us about humanity as a whole?"
With a "supporting cast" that was understandably camera-shy and a protagonist who was dead, Devor had to devise a narrative mode that was based on indirection. Working with his writing partner, Charles Mudede, a cultural critic for the Seattle alternative weekly, The Stranger (and with whom he previously collaborated on "Police Beat"), Devor chose a path that avoids all the tropes of reportage; surely the public had had enough of that. Rather, the team chose a style commensurate to the subject: If zoophilia represents some sort of break with reality, then their aesthetic approach had to represent a similar break with realism.
Since Pinyan's predilections were doubtless distasteful to most people, Devor had to go to great lengths to avoid making a film that most people would find distasteful. Drawing inspiration from such groundbreaking, visionary storytellers as Tarkovsky and Resnais enabled Devor to create highly impacted and impactful images evoking Pinyan's ecstasy - and agony - with the utmost of tact. As he puts it, "I aestheticized the sleaze right out of it!" Using nature and the splendid natural settings of the area as characters in the story, was another antidote to the "sleaze factor" and helped Devor create a visual experience that would be the antithesis to the crude videotapes the police found in that bucket.
In 2005, Robinson Devor premiered his second feature film, POLICE BEAT, in Dramatic Competition at Sundance 2005. The film was called "emotionally devastating" (Rolling Stone), "a visual knockout" (Variety) and "Sundance at its best" (Los Angeles Times), as well as named one of the year's best films by the New York Times, Film Comment and Art Forum. For his efforts, Devor was nominated for a 2006 Indie Spirit Award and 2005 Gotham Award.
Named one of Variety's "10 Directors To Watch" in 2000, Devor made his feature film directorial debut with THE WOMAN CHASER. Devor currently resides in Seattle, Washington. He was raised in Westchester County, NY and went to college at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, where he received his BA in Film.
Screeners Available
Photos at: http://www.vifc.org/fileshare/login.php
Username: Media
Password: Download
*note, only one photo is available
|
VANCOUVER PREMIERE // VANCITY THEATRE EXCLUSIVE
"A miraculously evenhanded treatment of a snarlingly divisive debate, Your Mommy Kills Animals tries to bring the animal-rights issue to heel, and there aren't enough muzzles to go around. There are no good guys or bad guys in this propulsive film, but there's enough in the way of odd characters and bad behavior to amuse and inform...Titling his film after a gore-filled PETA comicbook, helmer Curt Johnson isn't just reporting on the skirmishes between "bunny huggers" and mustache-twirling medical researchers. He's examining the internecine battles among people seemingly on the same side: the animal rights' activists vs. the animal welfare advocates, the shelter operators vs. radical confrontationalists...Johnson also gets into the gray matter of moral superiority, allowing the likes of physician Jerry Vlasak to make his case for violence against doctors involved in animal research, but also allowing more temperate voices to ask whether becoming a terrorist organization really helps anyone or anything."-John Anderson, Variety
Filmmaker Curt Johnson was inspired to explore the animal rights movement by "a post-9/11 FBI alert identifying animal rights activists as the number one domestic terror threat." Johnson interviewed activists and detractors alike, seeking out as many points of view as possible.
Reaching out to both Internet-savvy and grassroots audiences, Johnson created an aggressive marketing campaign using MySpace, working with activist organizations to do sneak-peek screenings in major cities, and creating a music video to promote his film (see video here). A ringtone from the Your Mommy Kills Animals title track written by Saturday Night Live's Greg Scarnici has had over 100,000 downloads in its first week proving rabid demand for an unvarnished look at both a movement and a moment in American policing priorities.
Johnson's other films include Thoth (2002 Academy Award-winning documentary) and the upcoming Pets On Your Plate.
"Johnson's film is refreshingly sober, the work of a documentarian more interested in surveying intractably fraught terrain than furthering the propaganda of his subjects." - Michael Koresky, INDIEWIRE
Screeners Available
View Trailer: YOUR MOMMY KILLS ANIMALS
Photos at: http://www.vifc.org/fileshare/login.php
Username: Media
Password: Download |
