This latest startling documentary from Tim Travers Hawkins is an exploration of what was once an American institution and a testament to the American Dream: The Catskill Game Farm, America’s very first (and largest) privately owned zoo. Opened by German immigrant Roland Lindemann in 1933, the Game Farm operated for 73 years and was, by most all accounts, an idyllic place in its heyday as a cage-less zoo run by the loving, devoted staff who also lived there. In 1959, Lindemann invited Dr. Heinz Heck from Berlin to America and made him zoo director. But in doing so, the Game Farm legacy became forever entwined with a much more disturbing zoological dynasty.

Utilising thousands of archival materials discovered recently in the ruins of what was the Game Farm, this investigative documentary inspires the feeling one is witnessing the excavation of a fallen empire. Utilising a variety of interviews, from those witnesses who spent their whole youth living on the zoo’s land to specialised history experts, American Zoo refuses to depict its subject in only one light, preferring a broader spectrum of truth.—Cara Cusumano