ZOOFOBIA

Who hasn’t had a magical moment at the Zoo? The fearsome tigers and the deafening roars of the lions, the huge and boring elephants, the incredible giraffe, the stunning condor, the rhinos and hippos. The memory of their mysterious and strange buildings, their lakes, bridges, and groves; the strangest animal-shaped cookies they bought us to feed the elephant with our hands, if we dared… In the memory of childhood, everything was wonderful, everything shone through our child’s eyes. That happened not so long ago, when the Buenos Aires Zoo was visited by 3 million people a year. We didn’t think it was strange for the animals to be in cages, even though 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 urbanized and disconnected from nature? Is there a model that surpasses the zoo, allowing education without animals in captivity? These were some of the first questions we asked ourselves when we started documenting the transformation process that the Buenos Aires Zoo was going through, which had closed to become an Ecopark.

While 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 last orangutan at the Zoo, was declared a “non-human person” by the court in a historic event that had never happened before in human history. For the first time, a primate was granted personhood rights, and a lawyer had requested those rights be guaranteed immediately. It was the beginning of something we knew would grow, changing perceptions and knowledge forever. But it was also the beginning of this documentary: ZOOFOBIA.