Project Nim

  • Documentary
7/8/2011
93
PG-13

The world will be a different place once you've seen it through his eyes.

From the team behind Man on Wire comes the story of Nim, the chimpanzee who in the 1970s became the focus of a landmark experiment which aimed to show that an ape could learn to communicate with language if raised and nurtured like a human child. Following Nim's extraordinary journey through human society, and the enduring impact he makes on the people he meets along the way, the film is an unflinching and unsentimental biography of an animal we tried to make human. What we learn about his true nature - and indeed our own - is comic, revealing and profoundly unsettling.

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  • Geronimo1967

    Now I know that hindsight is a marvellous thing, but quite how anyone could ever have thought that playing God with another animate creature like this would ever be justifiable is beyond me. The scientists here may have been well meaning enough, but I dont see how the writing on the wall could ever have been different for the chimp whom they called Nim Chimpsky. Wrested from his mother at birth, he is adopted like some sort of surrogate child by a group who are trying to prove that with a good deal of nurturing, they can teach him how to speak. They offer Nim all the trappings of family and become all that he knows and trusts and he reciprocates with behaviours that are loving, attention and mischievous. Then, of course, the science starts ...

    June 5, 2025

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