This October 9^th marks twenty years since the once-beloved Catskill Game Farm closed its doors for good. That same week, Tim Travers Hawkins' American Zoo will make its regional debut as the opening film of the Woodstock Film Festival at the Community Theater in Catskill on October 13^th. Hawkins' documentary is an exposé of the game farm's secret past and generated plenty of buzz in June after its premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival, particularly among adults in Upstate New York with memories of visiting the first privately owned zoo in the U.S. The October screening will be the first time the film has been available for viewing since June and will include a conversation with the award-winning Hawkins.

           Hawkins discovered dusty old 16mm film reels while exploring the ruins of the Catskill Game Farm, and stumbled upon far more than some old family movies. What he found pulled back the curtain on the popular destination's secret and lengthy association with the legacy of a Nazi animal breeding program. That topic alone would be enough to make an intriguing documentary, certainly for anyone who has set foot there. But instead, Hawkins uses that shocking past as a portal into a variety of interconnected themes, deftly weaving them into a reflective narrative that includes familial legacy and the crimes of our fathers, the relationship between humans and animals and capitalism, class division, and perhaps the most mind-blowing to me upon viewing the film: the genesis and concept behind the Third Reich's zoological breeding practices, of which I had never been privy before Hawkins' film. These universally compelling elements take American Zoo beyond a mere localized curiosity and into the realm of a film that could be more broadly appreciated upon its wider release (which has yet to be announced).

           At the center of the story is the arrival of Heinz Heck Jr. at the Catskill Game Farm in 1959. Heck was the nephew of Lutz Heck, a Nazi and head zoologist at the Berlin Zoo during Hitler's reign, and close pals with Joseph Goebbels. In fact, the breeding projects that Heinz took interest in were the brainchild of Goebbels and Lutz Heck. He was allowed to follow his curiosity in reviving the extinct Aurochs and Tarpan ponies at the Catskill Game Farm, where he was hired by Roland Lindemann. Lindemann was hell-bent on being the only zoo to have an animal or two as a draw for bigger crowds, so Heck's secret breeding program appealed to his inner businessman, with what seemed like a tacit agreement to never mention that pesky Nazi association. The results of these rather monstrous experiments are on display in American Zoo, so a heads-up for the squeamish. It ain't pretty.

 American Zoo could easily have been made with the same cheap "true crime" tone that dominates Netflix or Hulu these days, but Hawkins does not treat the subject with an exploitative heavy hand. The legacy of the game farm and the choices made by these men still impact their families, their former workers, and the world at large; Nazi ideology is sadly not a thing confined to the past, and Hawkins seems to understand that this dark history should not be presented glibly and keeps himself in the background as best he can. As a result, American Zoo offers something more than ghoulish intrigue, and that's a fortunate thing for us all.