Filmmaker Joshua Zeman discusses the human-animal bond in Checkpoint Zoo, revealing a unique perspective on war in the process.
It’s a common sentiment among moviegoers that it’s more upsetting to watch a non-human animal in pain than to watch an adult human suffer or die. There’s even a website, Does the Dog Die, which indexes films that contain animal deaths to provide trigger warnings for prospective audiences. Perhaps that explains the scarcity of war films focused on wildlife. However, Cropsey director Joshua Zeman’s documentary, Checkpoint Zoo, dares to do just that, capturing the beauty and mystery of the human-animal bond and recontextualizing the nature of war in the process.
Checkpoint Zoo chronicles the daring and sometimes deadly attempt to evacuate thousands of animals from an ecological park in Ukraine when Russia invaded the country in February 2022. Zeman and his many editors stitch together more than 120 hours of video taken by Feldman Ecopark’s staff and volunteers throughout this period, along with archival news footage and Zeman’s own footage during his visits to Ukraine after the fact.
“We’re talking about saving 4,750 animals in the course of a couple of months with tiny vehicles, only a core group of nine or ten people,” Zeman tells PopMatters. “They thought of this as a ‘mission impossible,’ but they were going to do it. They willed themselves to do it.” The result is a surprisingly suspenseful film that offers a different perspective on war than audiences may be accustomed to.
“Looking at war through an animal’s eyes is a unique perspective, one we don’t get a lot of,” Joshua Zeman notes. “That’s obviously one of the reasons I made the film, to provide this perspective. You can say that’s anthropomorphizing, or it’s something more. I think when you’re looking at war through the eyes of these animals, and imagining what they’re thinking, you realize issues of borders, boundaries, treaties, weapons, retaking a village, or retreating, none of those things really matter.
So I think that’s the beauty of looking at war through these animals’ eyes; you realize what’s really important at the end of the day.”
Checkpoint Zoo cleverly draws upon non-human animals to reveal aspects of the all-too-human condition. Joshua Zeman stresses that while the film’s subjects are ostensibly rescuing animals, they’re also saving themselves in the process. “These human beings who help these animals, they find what they have been stripped of,” Zeman adds.
“I always say that war, by definition of its brutality, is meant to strip away your humanity, and that’s exactly what happens, whether it’s this war or any war. But in saving these animals specifically, these individuals managed to regain their humanity through helping another species.”
One of the most fascinating elements of Checkpoint Zoo is its anthrozoological curiosity, filled as it is with intimate imagery of the animal-human bond. When Zeman went to Ukraine to interview the Ecopark volunteers and staff, he wanted to ask them about that bond. “That innate relationship, that interconnectivity, whether they could intellectualize it, speak about it, give me examples of that interconnectivity,” Zeman says regarding the questions he posed to the film’s subjects.
Joshua Zeman’s interviews with the remarkable rescuers have a visceral, cathartic feel to them, serving as not just recollection but also a form of closure. “What happened [to them] was so raw for them, they hadn’t had time to process, and because they were still in war – I mean, we’re only talking month five, so it’s almost like the beginning of the war for them,” notes Zeman.
“So talking about it in [Checkpoint Zoo] gave them an opportunity to, for the first time, process some of these unbelievable moments, these moments that they had interacting with these animals that you can’t even articulate.”
“It’s highly emotional,” Zeman adds. “You’re talking about creatures that are human-like in some respects, that are earthlings, that have some type of sentience, but also that are theoretically innocent; they have no stake in this war. So it becomes a really highly emotional touchpoint.
You know, there are people who say, ‘I can’t watch anything that deals with an animal in pain.’ And yes, this film does not show a lot of that. But what I’m trying to say is we have such heightened emotions when dealing with animals because they’re so innocent. I wanted to try and capture that on film. […] I expected there to be a bond, but I didn’t expect to see the bond so clearly.”
Checkpoint Zero goes beyond an exploration of that bond and moves into a subtle analysis of its ethics. The film depicts people risking their lives (and others’) to save different species of animals, sometimes with fatal consequences. By the end, the documentary tacitly questions the value of life and may leave viewers doing the calculus: is a little boy’s life worth the same as a massive lion’s? Is it the same estimate as an emu’s?
“Everybody could get behind saving a lion because it’s so majestic,” Zeman muses, “but can you risk your life for saving a hen or a guinea pig? It really makes you look at the sanctity of all life. How do we judge one sentient creature over another?”
Joshua Zeman recalls this subject arising frequently while filming. “I think all the time,” he adds. “I think they were constantly asking that question. I think other people were asking them that question, because of what happens in the third act of the film.
“And they will continue to say, ‘Absolutely,’ because it was the restorative effort of the animals; the animals gave them not just courage, but full purpose in their lives. You can ask, ‘Well, you know, was it worth it?’ I think they would say, ‘Yes, I didn’t just restore my humanity. I became a better person.’
“They were saving themselves too. Not just the animals,” Zeman adds with emphasis, “They came out of it feeling like they had done God’s work.”