ZOOPHOBIA

Who hasn’t had a magical moment at the Zoo? The fearsome tigers and the deafening roars of the lions, the enormous and boring elephants, the incredible giraffe, the striking condor, the rhinos and hippos. The memory of its mysterious and strange buildings, its lakes, bridges, and groves; the strangest animal-shaped cookies that we were bought to feed, if we dared, to the elephant with our hand…

In childhood memory, everything was wonderful; in our child’s eyes, everything shone. This happened not many years ago, when the Buenos Aires Zoo was visited by 3,000,000 people a year. We didn’t think it was strange that the animals were in cages, although they seemed narrow. Over the years, the world changed, and so did we.

Is a world without zoos possible, or is it a utopia? Can species survive on their own in a world increasingly invaded by humans, more urban and disconnected from nature? Is there a model superior to the zoo that allows for education without animals in captivity? These were some of the first questions that arose when we began documenting the transformation process of the Buenos Aires Zoo, which had closed tope  converted into an Eco-Park.

As we tried to understand what was happening, a story that would radically change the relationship between humans and animals was unfolding at the Buenos Aires Zoo: Sandra, the zoo’s last orangutan, was declared a “non-human person” by the court in an unprecedented event in human history. For the first time, a primate was recognized with personhood rights, and a lawyer had requested that those rights be guaranteed immediately. It was the beginning of something we knew would grow, forever changing perceptions and knowledge. But it was also the beginning of this documentary: ZOOFOBIA.