The Catskill Game Farm, which closed in 2006 after 73 years of operation, is the subject of a new documentary, American Zoo.
The British filmmaker Tim Travers Hawkins, who directed American Zoo, had this to say about the film on Instagram:
Four years ago me and my girlfriend (now mother of my son!) explored the ruins of an abandoned zoo on a camping trip in the Catskills. Inside the old gift shop I found some old 16mm films, which set in motion one of the strangest and most beautiful adventures of my life. The final result, my latest feature AMERICAN ZOO will premiere first at Tribeca Film Festival (June 4) and then days later at SXSW in London (June 6). Two awesome festivals in the two best cities on Earth.
The film is reviewed today in the Times Union: "'American Zoo' reveals Nazi-linked animal breeding program at Catskill Game Farm." It was previously reviewed in The Overlook: "New Documentary Unearths Dark Side of Catskill Game Farm."
The trailer for the documentary can be viewed on YouTube. According to Netflix Junkie, which described the film as a "true crime horror story," "Industry viewers expect the film to land a streaming or digital deal after its festival run, as interest in the project continues to build."
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Having lived in Columbia county my entire life, I was astounded and appalled to learn about the game farm's dark, horrid Nazi experiments on the animals! Thank you Tim Hawkins for this revelation!
ReplyDeleteBased on these two reviews, I am getting the impression that this documentary tries maybe a little too hard to shoehorn a Nazi connection into this zoo.
ReplyDeleteThe Heck family is well-known for their three zoologists. The father, Ludwig, was certainly the most aligned with Nazi race ideology. Infamously, he staged a so called "Völkerschau" (a peoples exhibition) in 1931 in Berlin where African men and women were put on display.
His two sons were Heinz and Lutz.
Both written reviews seem to be very confused and have a hard time keeping these three Hecks apart.
Only Heinz had any involvement with the Catskill zoo and of the three Hecks, he was the one that was not the Nazi. He was an early political prisoner in Dachau for being a communist and notably never joined the party either.
It's also unclear to me how deep Heinz's involvment in Catskill beginning in 1959 could have been given that he was the director of the Hellabrunn zoo in Munich until 1964.