American Zoo

In American Zoo, filmmaker Tim Travers Hawkins reframes a forgotten roadside attraction as a gripping excavation of American mythmaking. Once celebrated as the country’s first privately owned zoo, the Catskill Game Farm deep in the “Jewish Alps” drew generations of families with the promise of a perfect harmony between humans, animals, and the natural world. But after the park’s closure, abandoned reels of home movies and buried histories reveal a far darker legacy lurking beneath the nostalgia. Part investigative thriller, part historical reckoning, the film traces an unsettling lineage connecting the zoo’s founders to controversial experiments in animal breeding and the racial ideologies of twentieth-century Europe. Drawing from a remarkable archive and firsthand testimony, Hawkins crafts a documentary that constantly shifts beneath the viewer’s feet, challenging the superficial sentimentality with unsettling questions about power, spectacle, and man's propensity for cruelty. What begins as a study on a seemingly harmless piece of Americana, American Zoo gradually reveals its teeth as an examination of dangerous belief systems and the institutions that engender them. —Lori Donnelly

West Coast Premiere

Tim Travers Hawkins is an Emmy-nominated documentary filmmaker known for cinematic and investigative nonfiction work. He studied at the EICTV film school in Cuba and trained in Latin America with filmmakers Fernando Birri and Pino Solanas. His debut feature XY Chelsea (Tribeca 2019, Showtime) was nominated for two Documentary Emmy Awards and the Cinema for Peace Award. His films include The Movement (The Guardian), Persona (HBO Max), Burn It Down! (BFI London Film Festival), and Capturing the Killer Nurse (Netflix). His work often explores systems of power, justice, and institutional accountability.