「Zoo,」 the new film by the Seattle director Robinson Devor, arrived at the Sundance Film Festival in January better known as 「the horse sex documentary.」 But as festival audiences discovered, this description, while not incorrect, was also misleading. The film revisit the true story of a man who died in July 2005 after a sexual encounter with a horse in a rural Washington State but does so with a lyricism startlingly at odds with the sensational content.

「This topic is not something people want to think about,」 Mr. Devor said in an interview at Sundance, summing up both the challenge of marketing the film and the reason he and his writing partner, Charles Mudede, were compelled to make it.

Speaking at the premiere Mr. Mudede called 「Zoo」 a 「thought experiment.」 He added, 「If someone can go there physically, I can go there mentally.」

Contemplating an unorthodox merging of man and beast, 「Zoo」 is itself an exotic hybrid: a fact-based film combining audio testimony with speculative re-enactments that feature a mix of actors and actual subjects. (The title is the subcultural term for a zoophile, a person whose affinity for animals sometimes extends to the carnal.)

「Zoo」 obliquely recreates the events of the fateful night that caused a media frenzy in the Seattle area two summers ago. Shortly after being dropped off at an emergency room in Enumclaw, Washington, a 45-year-old Boeing engineer named Kenneth Pinyan－known in the film only by his Internet nickname, Mr. Hands－died of internal injuries resulting from perforated colon. The police investigation led to a farm and uncovered videotapes and DVDs that showed several men engaging in sexual acts with the resident Arabian stallions. Bestiality was not illegal in Washington

Mr. Devor and Mr. Mudede, a columnist for the Seattle weekly The Stranger, noticed a disturbing uniformity in news coverage and public opinion surrounding the case.

「There seemed to be two responses: repulsion or laughter,」 Mr. Mudede said. 「People didn't want to have any connection or identification with these men. Early on Rob and I said to each other, 『we're going to revive their humanity.'」

「Zoo」 allows the friends of the dead man a means for disclosure and dares to find, in their candid accounts of their desires and the hidden worlds where they were fulfilled, something strangely beautiful and even recognizable.

「It was fascinating that there was a community of close friends, that there were basic human interactions happening alongside things that seemed completely alien,」 Mr. Mudede said. What emerges here is a sad, even tender portrait of a group of men who met from time to time at a farm, where they would drink cocktails, watch television and go to the barn to have sex with horses.

The film's nonzoophile perspective is provided by Jenny Edwards, the founder of a local rescue organization called Hope for Horses, who helped investigate potential animal abuse in the case. 「I don't yet quite know how I feel about that,」 she says in the film, referring to the intense feelings that zoophiles claim to have for animals, 「but I'm right at the edge of being able to understand it.」

「Zoo」 invites the viewer out onto that ledge of near comprehension. That it does so with neither squeamishness nor prurience owes much to Mr. Devor's approach, one that was born of necessity. The story's central figure was dead, and his family wanted nothing to do with the film. Only one of the three zoophiles interviewed agreed to appear in the re-enactments. All are identified simply by their online names: Coyote, H and the Happy Horseman.

Coyote, the only zoophile who appears in the film, said in a recent e-mail interview that he came to trust Mr. Devor after meeting him a few times. 「I felt in my gut he was not going to make an exploitive type of movie,」 he wrote.

But he remains conflicted about his involvement. 「I do not think a higher profile is good at all,」 he said. 「We have no torch to bear or cause to defend. We just want to be.」