A Lyrical Approach to a Subject That Shocks (Published 2007) (2024)

ZOO,” the new film by the Seattle director Robinson Devor, arrived at this year’s Sundance Film Festival better known as “the horse sex documentary.” But as festival audiences discovered, this description, while not incorrect, was also misleading. The film revisits the true story of a man who died in July 2005 after a sexual encounter with a horse in rural Washington State but does so with a lyricism startlingly at odds with the sensational content.

“This topic is not something people want to think about,” Mr. Devor said in an interview at Sundance, summing up both the challenge of marketing the film and the reason he and his writing partner, Charles Mudede, were compelled to make it.

Speaking at the premiere Mr. Mudede called “Zoo” a “thought experiment.” He added, “If someone can go there physically, I can go there mentally.”

Contemplating an unorthodox merging of man and beast, “Zoo” (which is set to open in New York on April 25) is itself an exotic hybrid: a fact-based film combining audio testimony with speculative re-enactments that feature a mix of actors and actual subjects. (The title is the subcultural term for a zoophile, a person whose affinity for animals sometimes extends to the carnal.)

“Zoo” obliquely recreates the events of the fateful night that caused a media frenzy in the Seattle area two summers ago. Shortly after being dropped off at an emergency room in Enumclaw, Wash., a 45-year-old Boeing engineer named Kenneth Pinyan — known in the film only by his Internet handle, Mr. Hands — died of internal injuries resulting from a perforated colon. The police investigation led to a farm and turned up videotapes and DVDs that showed several men engaging in sexual acts with the resident Arabian stallions. bestial*ty was not illegal in Washington at the time, but in response to the Pinyan incident the State Senate voted last year to criminalize it.

Mr. Devor and Mr. Mudede, a columnist for the Seattle weekly The Stranger, noticed a disturbing uniformity in news coverage and public opinion surrounding the case.

“There seemed to be two responses: repulsion or laughter,” Mr. Mudede said. “People didn’t want to have any connection or identification with these men. Early on Rob and I said to each other, ‘We’re going to revive their humanity.’ ”

“Zoo” strives to liberate Mr. Hands from his posthumous fate as tabloid punch line. It allows the friends of the dead man a means for disclosure and dares to find, in their candid accounts of their desires and the hidden worlds where they were fulfilled, something strangely beautiful and even recognizable.

“It was fascinating that there was a community of close friends, that there were basic human interactions happening alongside things that seemed completely alien,” Mr. Mudede said. “Zoo” minimizes its freak show aspect by emphasizing the coexistence of the mundane and the bizarre, a strategy it shares with the pair’s 2005 Sundance entry, “Police Beat,” an enigmatic reverie inspired by Mr. Mudede’s crime-blotter column. What emerges here is a sad, even tender portrait of a group of men who met from time to time at a farm, where they would drink slushy co*cktails, watch some television and repair to the barn to have sex with horses.

The film’s nonzoophile perspective is provided by Jenny Edwards, the founder of a local rescue organization called Hope for Horses, who helped investigate potential animal abuse in the Enumclaw case. “I don’t yet quite know how I feel about that,” she says in the film, referring to the intense feelings that zoophiles claim to have for animals, “but I’m right at the edge of being able to understand it.”

“Zoo” invites the viewer out onto that ledge of near comprehension. That it does so with neither squeamishness nor prurience owes much to Mr. Devor’s sidelong approach, one that was born of necessity. The story’s central figure was dead, and his family wanted nothing to do with the film. Only one of the three zoophiles interviewed agreed to appear in the re-enactments. All are identified simply by their online names: Coyote, H and the Happy Horseman.

“I’m glad we weren’t able to depend on the talking-head approach,” Mr. Devor said. Mr. Mudede concurred. “It was a chance to really make a film instead of a ‘60 Minutes’-style documentary,” he said.

Driving for the first time into Enumclaw, a town at the base of snow-capped Mount Rainier, the filmmakers immediately grasped the cinematic potential. “Talk about a mythic place,” Mr. Devor said. “This happened in the shadow of a volcano, in these verdant fields. You had beautiful animals, private gatherings, secret societies.”

“Zoo” makes the most of its Edenic setting. Sean Kirby’s Super-16 cinematography reinforces the sense of a prelapsarian idyll, with lush images of rhododendrons in bloom, Mount Rainier perfectly framed in a picture window, men walking through the woods at night in dreamy slow motion.

Unabashed aesthetes, Mr. Devor and Mr. Mudede are anomalies in the grungy landscape of American indie film. Given the off-putting subject matter “Zoo” might even be accused of using beauty as a salve, as some reviewers grumbled at Sundance.

Responding to this critique Mr. Mudede said: “I don’t think the aesthetic element is deceiving. It’s not that we’re making something difficult more accessible through beauty. That’s exactly the situation in which these men experienced their friendship.”

But he added, laughing, “I admit if this had happened on an ugly pig farm we wouldn’t have made the film.”

Mr. Devor said it was tricky trying to communicate the movie he had in mind to his wary subjects: “They would be like, ‘What do you mean impressionistic images?’ ”

As it happened, it was a zoo, as the participants call themselves, who initiated contact, sending an e-mail message to Mr. Mudede in response to an article he had written about the case. “I think there was a desperate need to talk,” Mr. Mudede said.

Coyote, the only zoo who appears in the film, said in a recent e-mail interview that he came to trust Mr. Devor after meeting him a few times. “I felt in my gut he was not going to make an exploitive type of movie,” he wrote.

Despite an instinctive suspicion of publicity, it was evidently important to the zoos that their stories be heard. H, the farmhand who was the host of the get-togethers, called Mr. Devor in mid-December after “Zoo” had been selected for Sundance and consented to an audio interview (leaving Mr. Devor just a few weeks to frantically re-edit the film).

Coyote, for his part, remains conflicted about his involvement. “I do not think a higher profile is good at all,” he said. “We have no torch to bear or cause to defend. We just want to be.”

According to Mr. Devor the biggest challenge was not getting the zoos to talk but finding a location to shoot the film.

“We went to every single horse farm within two hours of Seattle and came up empty,” he said. “Owners would say things like: ‘We have Microsoft picnics here. They’re going to think it happened in my barn.’ ” He finally found a sympathetic farmer in Canada, who helped pull some strings with a landowner in Washington.

The overwhelming aversion to zoophilia is bound up in established taboos and moral codes. The debate, if it would come to that, tends to concern the welfare of the animal and the murky issue of consent. The men in “Zoo” attest to the fulfilling completeness of zoophile relationships and claim not to resort to coercion. On the latter count they have an unlikely ally in Rush Limbaugh, who can be heard in the film weighing in on Mr. Pinyan’s death: “How in the world could this happen without consent?”

But the apparent arousal of the horses is beside the point for many animal advocates, including Ms. Edwards. “Horses have an incredible sense memory and are unbelievably willing to learn,” she said in an e-mail message. “They want to do what is asked of them. But I’m not convinced they want to have sex with us.”

Mr. Devor interviewed the zoos and is more inclined to term the sex consensual. He spoke to them one-on-one, in hotel rooms, and his subjects sometimes illustrated their points by showing him homemade p*rnography. “It was in my face, really graphic stuff,” he said. “It’s a strange way to get to know someone.” But some of what he saw did change his outlook.

The sex in “Zoo” is merely glimpsed and barely discernible in a few seconds of a video that the police had confiscated and that was circulated on the Internet after Mr. Pinyan’s death.

“The film is extreme more in its formalism than in terms of graphic content,” said Mark Urman, an executive producer of “Zoo” and the head of theatrical releasing at ThinkFilm, which is distributing it. “One really worries if there’s a significant population looking for the tabloid version.”

But Mr. Devor has detected among audiences a curiosity, if not an appetite, to see more. “So many people have said to me there’s not enough sex,” he said. “I think there’s a need to see the mechanics.”

Those viewers should be careful what they wish for. “Maybe we can find some things to put on the DVD,” Mr. Devor said.