At least the animals had time to pack when God flooded the world. That was not the case when missile shells fell upon Feldman Ecopark, a roughly 350-acre landscape park containing more than 5,000 animals, and the setting of the touching yet tense documentary film, Checkpoint Zoo. Located in the northern Kharkiv region of Ukraine, just 30 kilometers from the Russian border, Ecopark became an almost literal monkey-in-the-middle between the two nations’ fiery exchanges.
Feldman Ecopark closed as the Russo-Ukrainian War ramped up and Russia invaded in 2022, its staff diminishing from more than 100 dedicated workers to just ten. Understandably so. Would you risk it all for an alpaca? Is a lion’s life worth as much as a man’s? Some people think so, and they’re the subjects of Checkpoint Zoo. Well, them and 5,000 animals.
Checkpoint Zoo wastes little time establishing its narrative, characters, and stakes, carrying a similar no-nonsense approach throughout most of the film. We’re introduced to the beautiful Ecopark, which makes the most of its creatures with charity programs for children with special needs, such as animal therapy. It’s founded by the titular Oleksandr Feldman, a remarkable politician and the kind of man who weeps when animals suffer.
Feldman is one of several subjects who make Checkpoint Zoo a fascinating study of anthrozoology. “It’s impossible to explain. It’s like a disease, it’s like addiction,” says Andrii Tyvaniuk, a big, burly, bearded bro who used to be an unhoused drug abuser dining out of garbage cans, as he says in the film. He credits Ecopark for taking him in and treats the animals as if they’ve saved his life, which they kind of have.
Tyvaniuk and Feldman are just two of the animal lovers in a film for animal lovers, but thankfully this is not a feature-length version of singer-songwriter Sarah McLachlan‘s 2006 ASPCA commercial, and is neither emotionally manipulative nor saccharine. As a film enamored with animals and “animal people”, Checkpoint Zoo neither languishes in their misery nor uses them as mere narrative tools.
Director Joshua Zeman and a dozen film editors concurrently combed through more than 120 hours of footage shot by these Ecopark workers and volunteers, along with archival news footage and material Zeman and his crew filmed during three trips to Ukraine in 2022 and 2023. Together, the footage chronicles the Ecopark team and its animals, from “Day One” of the Russian invasion (24 February 2022) through “Day 71”, when the last of more than 4,700 animals were evacuated to safety. Checkpoint Zero is a very post-digital film as a result, its changing aspect ratios and handheld camerawork reflect the phone-filmed and online-posted nature of its documentation.
Social media and the internet play huge roles in Checkpoint Zoo, as well. After 90% of Ecopark’s staff left, and with ammunition assaulting its acreage, the remaining workers were desperate. “From the first day of the war, we were left without electricity, without heat, without water. It had to be delivered,” recounts one zookeeper, with the film depicting a bleak, empty landscape dotted with animals sheltering from the -18°C weather.
Ecopark used social media to call for help, which caught the attention of a delightfully strange young man named Tymofii. He couldn’t get anyone on the phone, so he simply drove to the Ecopark himself, ready to drop everything and help. Tymofii is a wonderful subject, a joyful warrior who seems unfazed by contemporary life and its many reasons to feel miserable about it.
Tymofii brings along a few other young men looking for adventure, and they effectively kick off the mission-driven nature of Checkpoint Zero. After a few weeks, it’s clear that the animals can no longer remain in Ecopark. The final nail in the head is a missile strike on the roof of the monkey house, after which multiple apes died of heart attacks. That’s the kind of intimate detail that helps Zeman’s film endear viewers to the animals.
The human-animal bond is beautifully showcased throughout Checkpoint Zero, with man and beast meeting each other at the middle. It’s heartwarming, often funny, and fairly mesmerizing. We understand why these people are risking their lives, even if braving missiles to save some sloths may seem silly to others. “There are smart decisions, and there are right decisions,” says one worker.
While not exactly anthropomorphizing the animals, Checkpoint Zero nonetheless details their anxieties, anger, loneliness, and fear, capturing the emotional impact of the war in a way which quite literally transcends the human. “Animals, birds, and monkeys died from thrashing in their cages, crushing themselves to death in fear,” one Ecopark worker recounts. By experiencing the animals’ reaction to war, we gain an empathy and understanding for our own species that’s truly universal, regardless of any nationality or ideology.
Checkpoint Zoo finds director Joshua Zeman continuing his turn away from dark true crime (including the phenomenal 2009 documentary, Cropsey) and toward nature, following 2021’s The Loneliest Whale: The Search for 52. His time in true crime equipped him with an ability to craft dread and suspense, which goes a long way in Checkpoint Zoo. One tremendously tense sequence involving the evacuation of predator cats from Ecopark feels straight out of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1953 psychological drama, The Wages of Fear, and answers the question: How do you move a mighty (and hungry) lion in a war zone without becoming dinner?
Aside from “Saving Private Lion”, as one Ecopark worker calls it, Checkpoint Zoo is littered with miniature marvels of heroism. While not without tragedy, the film highlights that elusive epithet which Hollywood believes belongs best in war films – “the human spirit” – in a movingly unalloyed way. Ironically, this human spirit is brought out by animals and that human-animal bond, allowing us to experience it without the politics, imperialism, or patriarchy that so often comes with depictions of bravery, courage, selflessness, and the ultimate sacrifice.
At one point in Checkpoint Zoo, Oleksander Feldman refers to his home as “Noah’s Ark”, crammed full of animals evacuated from Ecopark. Sadly, the flooding of Russian aggression has lasted far more than 40 days and nights, with no dove in sight. It’s unclear where things will go from here, but Checkpoint Zero has a timeless quality to it which almost surpasses the Russo-Ukrainian War in particular; the bond between our species.