Project Nim
Project Nim
Format: Cinema
Release date: 12 August 2011
Venues: Key cities
Distributor: Icon
Director: James Marsh
UK/USA 2011
93 mins
Stylistically, James Marsh’s new film, Project Nim, is a fairly classic documentary. Using interviews and archival footage, Marsh pieces together the remarkable and disturbing story behind Project Nim, the misguided experiment to teach sign language to the eponymous chimpanzee, raised from infancy by a human family in New York. It’s a heart-breaking story; Nim was a victim of unbelievable hubris, and while loved by the people who cared for him, he was also abandoned when he became less like a human child and more like a wild animal. It’s an intriguing film, but the people interviewed (Nim’s original family, the scientist who devised the experiment, other researchers), with one or two exceptions, are just so unlikeable, and some of their actions so unconscionable, that it’s impossible to identify with them.
Sarah Cronin
