The Thousands

Man On Wire director James Marsh has ostensibly made a documentary about Nim Chimpsky (1973-2000), a chimpanzee raised as a human and taught sign language in the hope he could communicate. However, Nim himself remains enigmatically absent from this film. Instead, it’s a study of human hubris – how can we hope to understand an animal when we understand so little about ourselves?

Project Nim was startlingly disorganised. No staff had any training in chimp behaviour; they were largely wide-eyed students recruited by the lead researcher, behavioural psychologist Herbert Terrace. Refreshingly, Marsh doesn’t editorialise, preferring to let Nim’s sad lifetime pattern of attachment and separation unfold through archival footage and revealingly unguarded interviews with his former carers. These include Terrace, the hippyish Stephanie LaFarge (who breastfed Nim and let him puff on joints), no-nonsense Laura-Ann Petitto, and endearing Grateful Dead fan Bob Ingersoll, who befriended Nim once the project was over.

All remember the chimp fondly, seeming profoundly moved by their encounter. Terrace, however, emerges as a slapdash scientist, sexual manipulator and vain self-promoter. Sometimes funny, sometimes harrowing, Project Nim is a clear-eyed examination of how human cruelty can spring inadvertently from the most empathetic impulses.