Travel Blog

Saturday afternoon we drove to Coral Gables to see “Checkpoint Zoo” at the Coral Gables Art Cinema. The theater was sold out for the documentary, which tells the story of how a small band of volunteers rescued over 4,000 animals from the Feldman Eco Park outside Kharkiv after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Much of the film consists of videos made by the volunteers as they worked to save the animals, and includes shots of them taking shelter during bombardments. There is also footage of explosions in the city, apartment buildings being ripped apart. Nothing I had seen on the news captured so vividly the horror of the war.

And yet this ragtag band of young men spent the first few months of it, often cheerfully, capturing and transporting llamas, kangaroos, moose, orangutans, bears, and lions to the Kharkiv Zoo (which was not as close to the front as Eco Park was) and to the home of Oleksandr Feldman, whose love for the animals was unsurpassed. (Later we see the businessman’s depleted wine cellar, as he sold all his old bottles – as well as his art collection – to buy food to feed his menagerie.) After posting online about the park’s predicament, the group received some food and medicines from abroad, and there is an amazing scene of the veterinarian among the volunteers calmly, and successfully, delivering tranquilizers to lions and tigers through a blow gun. “I play the trumpet,” he tells a colleague nonchalantly.

Later, one of the volunteers says: “There are smart decisions. And there are right decisions.” Clearly, risking his life to save some animals fit only into the second category.

After the film, Ron Magill of Zoo Miami led a Q&A with the director Joshua Zeman. Before he asked any questions, he spoke with even more enthusiasm than usual, and with great awe, of the work of the Ukrainian volunteers. The tranquilizing scene, for instance, blew him away. At the zoo, he said, they weigh every animal to know exactly how much anesthesia to give it; at Eco Park, they were just guessing. And they got it right! “Except for that one leopard.”

He recalled the scene of the volunteer walking hand-in-hand with an orangutan. That looked like a lovely moment, Magill said, but a juvenile orangutan can rip your arm off. Clearly, he said, the animals realized that the people were helping them.

In the film, one of the volunteers says: “Humans are humans and animals are animals. But sometimes humans are like animals and animals are like humans.”