Project Nim movie review:
Nim's troubles began in 1973, soon after his birth in a primate research centre in Oklahoma, where he was snatched from his natural mother and taken to live in Manhattan to be cared for as a human baby by a Columbia University psychology student, Stephanie LaFarge.
But the main object was to teach him sign language. He was to be the prize exhibit in an experiment designed by LaFarge's professor, Herbert Terrace, who emerges from James Marsh's heartbreaking documentary as the kind of entrepreneurial academic who rates every project by the publicity it can generate.
Inspired by journalist Elizabeth Hess's book, Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human, Marsh pieces together the chimpanzee's devastating story without a linking narration.
The storytellers are the people who moved in and out of Nim's life before he died of a heart attack at the age of 26 - young for a chimp - in 2000. Some were only briefly involved with him as carer, researcher, jailer or a combination of all three. Others became so attached to him and so incensed by the arbitrary cruelty that marked his life, they tried to rescue him. All sound shaken by their encounter with ''project Nim''.
Terrace's interest in the chimpanzee's development is focused on one thing. He wants to know if primates can be taught to construct sentences with sign language. When Nim becomes adept at signalling his needs with single words, it isn't good enough.
As a result, he comes up with a typically efficient - and typically insensitive - solution. Nim is returned to sender. He's shipped back to the Oklahoma research centre where he was born. And here, he experiences a turbulent reintroduction to his own species that is harrowing to watch.
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/movies/human-interest-story-20110929-1kxu4.html#ixzz1ZmBCg7vj
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