Project Nim (2011)

Project Nim is the new film from director James Marsh, who gave us the Oscar-winning doco Man on Wire back in 2008. As it stands, he’s perhaps the only documentary filmmaker who can get away with reenactments. His latest picture tells the story of a chimpanzee named Nim, who was plucked as a baby from his mother and raised like a human child as part of a Columbia University experiment.

With little regard made for his heartbroken mother, or with any foresight as to how this separation would affect him in later years, Nim Chimpsky was put in the care of a hippie family. The matriarch allowed Nim to suckle her breast for milk, while the rest of the clan tried to teach the chimp how to use sign language. In a pattern that would repeat itself no matter whose care he was in, Nim eventually turned violent (as animals are wont to do) and was cast out from his new home.

Marsh introduces us to the key carers in Nim’s life, mostly scientists and animal lovers, each of whom show deep remorse for the way in which they betrayed their subject by treating him … well, by treating him as a subject. It’s a slickly made doco, specifically designed to tug on the heartstrings. I would have liked to have seen how living with a chimp affected the lives of the humans; although we learn how much they love him, as well as how sad they made him, I was curious as to what toll caring for a baby animal (not as a pet, but as a child) would have taken on the carers.

There have been similar experiments in the past, where an infant chimp was raised with a human baby, and the baby began taking on the traits of the chimp instead of the other way around. Regardless, this absence of scientific observation is excised in favour of emotional resonance, and Project Nim has that in spades. For a movie about an ape, it sheds an interesting light on humanity. Animals may be wild, but only humans are cruel.

3.5/5

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“It was the seventies!” Is a line used in this documentary, to justify what was known as Project Nim; the forceful taking of a baby chimpanzee from its mother for the purpose of science. Led by Herbert S. Terrace, of New York’s Columbia University, Nim Chimpsky – as he was named – would be used to test the long debated theory of nature versus nurture. Raised as a human, first in a family home and then by various research assistants, Nim’s journey continued through the late seventies and eighties to a lab in Oklahoma, before being sold to a medical research centre owned by New York University. Nim would end his days at Black Beauty Ranch in Texas, at first the only chimp there, he would be reunited with his own kind before his death in March 2010.

While Nim was treated like a human by many of his carers, it was his ability to learn sign language that made the world stand up and take notice. Could a chimpanzee communicate with a human? Directed by James Marsh, who gave us the Oscar winning Man on Wire, Project Nim is a heart wrenching exposé of the thin line between humans and animals. It examines the lengths we go to in the name of scientific research; questions our humanity in firstly removing infant chimps from their natural environment, and secondly abandoning them when it no longer fulfils our needs.

Thankfully, amidst the shock and anger one feels towards many of the people involved in this project, who interestingly have come forward to speak, there are the few shining beacons of hope; those who continued to fight for Nim’s freedom and safety. To say Project Nim is a touching film is an understatement. Thoughtfully constructed and edited, you are at once laughing at Nim’s antics and soon after shedding a tear or two, the impact of the film resonating many hours later. Like Frankenstein and his monster, those who created Nim were responsible for his downfall, and while the documentary relies heavily on the emotional side of the issue, it is an interesting, if brief, exploration of late 20th century science.

3.5/5