All Walks of Film: Review: Project Nim


Directed by James Marsh (*Man on Wire*) 2011

I wanted to see this film for many reasons. Most obvious: I loved Rise of the Planet of the Apes and wanted to see the true story that inspired it. The other: I frickin loved Marsh's Man on Wire.
Project Nim is about a scientific chimpanzee named Nim, who is taken from his mother at birth and sent to live with a human family and raised like a normal child.
Human beings and chimpanzees share mostly the same genes, but of course there's a distinct difference: Human Beings have evolved to a social structure that no other living animal on this earth has achieved. The question that this documentary raises is: How much do we differ from our primate ancestry?
At first, the project looks very promising. Nim is a young chimp, and becomes the first non human to learn sign language. Nim is then able to learn partial sentences. He likes to hug, play, and hold other animals, but he also learns early on he can get away with things. As he continues to grow stronger, he realizes he can manipulate the people around him. He also becomes progressively more violent.
In, Project Nim, Nim get moved from place to place to place, it would be traumatic for anyone. He lashes out and the consequences are severe. Many of the women and men (mostly women), have many scars all over their bodies, where Nim had hurt them, some of these intentional, some of which Nim did not know his own strength.
As things get progressively worse, and Nim get's bigger he gets put away in an ape shelter, similar to the one portrayed in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. The next two places, he is moved to is heartbreaking: A rather inhumane lab, and then rescued to live in an animal sanctuary, where he is caged, and alone.
This film is heartbreaking. Unlike Man on Wire, there is tons of footage of Nim. I feel bad for his caretakers, and if I were in any way involved, I probably would've killed him to save the women. There are many cases where they were beaten, had their head slammed into the ground, had part of their cheek bitten, and they didn't sue and the experiment stopped because of funding and no other reason.
This film is a must see for anyone who enjoyed Rise of Planet of the Apes, or see some of the early scientific experiments of nonhuman interaction

94%

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