Blogcritics The critical lens on today's culture & entertainment
American Zoo
Tim Travers Hawkins outdoes himself in his riveting expose American Zoo, a story of dark and light about America’s first private zoo. The documentary, in its world premiere at Tribeca Festival 2026, builds to many essential points. One is the question: To what extent are private companies committing illegal and untoward acts to enhance their profitability by avoiding public scrutiny and governmental interference? When the business involves families and children, shouldn’t they be trusted to put ethics and care first? Or does success and money trump all ethical and moral considerations?
Unfortunately, in the last 20 years and especially during the current administration, the latter question seems rhetorical.
Investigating the private zoo inspired by the American Dream
On that theme, which is one feature of his complex, fact-based documentary, Travers uses extensive interviews and valuable material, including reels of home movies, archived documents, books and photos, and photos from family legacies. With these, he opens up a new avenue of exploration into Upstate New York’s Catskill Game Farm. The documentary slips under the joy, peace and fun of the amazing place and the owners’ striking idea (at the time) to allow animals to roam free and enjoy their lives.
Underneath the clean, white American brand lurked an association with Hitler’s criminal crony Hermann Göring. Göring was a high-ranking Nazi official and founder of the Gestapo. Those who wore the cap or uniforms with the skull and crossbones were instrumental in the genocidal extermination of Jews and others in the Eastern European concentration camps during World War Two.
Did the owner of the zoo know that one individual in particular had close ties with the Nazis and Göring? By the time folks thought to ask questions, the owner and key players had died. Only the children remained. One daughter (a scientist in a family dynasty of German zoologists named Heck) knew of the darkness. While she was dying of cancer in Scotland she went on the record about her grandfather. An enlightened view of the Catskill Game Farm emerges through her interview along with interviews with the zoo owner’s daughter, zookeepers, workers, spouses and researchers.
Travers Hawkins structures his fascinating film in three sections. But first, he introduces the Catskill Game Farm through period radio and TV ads, and videos of those who visited the farm, which was a success because it fostered love of animals and stoked interest in unfamiliar animals that were facing extinction.
A wonderland of animals in the heart of the Borscht Belt
If you ask any New Yorker who vacationed upstate during a certain era, they may tell you about the Catskill Game Farm. It was a lovely first-of-its-kind private zoo that added foreign animals never seen before, to the delight of visitors who numbered in the millions before the Farm fell into disrepair and closed in 2006.
America’s very first (and largest) privately owned zoo was opened by German immigrant Roland Lindemann in 1933. A host of zookeepers and employees who lived and worked there in community for the love of animals kept the Game Farm going for 73 years. Though the pay was low, they loved being with the animals. They even offered to buy the place when Lindemann’s daughter found the business growing harder to run profitably. But at the peak of its success, families who visited found its peaceful, lovely surroundings heavenly. Little did they know it held a dark side that would have given them pause.
A turning point
Lindemann loved animals, but procured them for his zoo sometimes by poaching. He came to understand how some species were going extinct because hunting parties were slaughtering the beautiful creatures for wasteful fun, not even using their bodies. One way to counteract this was through conserving animals’ DNA. Also, breeding programs could prevent animals going extinct.
So for the ssake of conservation and preservation in 1959, Lindemann invited Dr. Heinz Heck from Berlin to the Catskill Game Farm. He made him zoo director and gave him free rein to establish a genetics program. Heck attempted to research a way to prevent future animal extinctions.
In another pathway, Heck and his father, who would come to visit during summers, worked on a program to reverse-engineer animals that had an important place in German history and folklore. As it turns out, in the heart of an area defined by summer resorts for those who had been through the horrors of the Holocaust, Heck was working on the genetics of animals that symbolized strength, heavily romanticized in the Nazi Party’s mythology. In other words, if they brought back these mythic creatures, their “resurrection” would be a symbolic affirmation of the romantic ideals of Nazism which could never be extinguished.
Reverse-engineering
The film’s’ tie-ins with the Hecks’ genetics and breeding program and the Nazi party are astounding in the last third of the film. On the one hand, Heck and his grandfather had two animal reverse-engineering successes. Travers Hawkins follows these details through interviews with Heck’s daughter and archived photos and materials. Home videos are also essential in telling the story of the research and showing the reverse-engineered animals.
The director follows the story to its tragic conclusion. Perhaps if the Catskill Game Farm had become a nonprofit and received grants from the government, the research would have continued under regulations and for the betterment of zoology and the planet. It was not to be.
American Zoo is screening at Tribeca Festival.
