American Zoo

Synopsis

AMERICAN ZOO is a stranger-than-fiction documentary thriller built from found footage and buried family secrets. Lost films, found in the rubble of America’s once largest private zoo, unlock a remarkable saga of two families – the Lindemanns, chasing dreams of amassing the greatest collection of rare animals in America and the Hecks, a German zoological dynasty with an unsavory past – entwined in a story of myth, power, and obsession.

At first it plays like a surreal Jurassic Park in the Catskills: To the eager tourists, the Catskill Game Farm was pure family fun – elephants, hamburgers, summer nostalgia. But behind the fences lurked something stranger: attempts to resurrect primordial superbeasts from extinction, the byproduct of Nazi experiments to bend nature to fascist dreams, hidden in plain sight.

Part faded Americana, part Frankenstein horror, AMERICAN ZOO is a cinematic excavation where pseudoscience and ambition run out of control and nature itself becomes the battleground.

• Director Tim Travers Hawkins
• Produced by Julia Nottingham
• Produced by Melanie Archer
• Executive Producer Mary Lisio
• Executive Producer Mandy Chang
• Executive Producer Vicki Cooper
• Editor Chris A. Peterson ACE
• Editor Pete Norrey
• Music by Dan Deacon
• Production Executive Rashpal Dhaliwal
• Producer Kat Peschken
• Line Producer Dominic Danielewicz
• Production Coordinator Serena Lung
• Production Coordinator Katy Whittington
• Producer India Woods
• Associate Producer Rosanna Potter
• Archival Producer Ella Marsh
• Archival Producer Giorgia Papapietro
• Archival Researcher Phoebe Ball
• Archival Researcher Alex Rickard
• Researcher Ruby Davis
• Director of Photography Patrick Smith
• Director of Photography Isaac Mead-Long
• Director of Photography Joe Bender
• Director of Photography Mik Bakalarz
• Director of Photography Mikul Eriksson
• Director of Photography Kelly Adams