In 1973, Nim the chimpanzee was torn screaming from his mother at a primate research centre in Oklahoma, where he had been born a few days earlier. He was to be raised by a human family and taught sign language, with the aim of determing whether he could learn to communicate, not simply with crude single-word gestures, but with more sophisticated, grammatically correct sentences.
Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker James Marsh had read Elizabeth Hess's book, Nim Chimpsky, and was drawn to the way it told 'an animal's life story in the same way as you tell a human's'. For his documentary, Project Nim, he interviewed the experiment's architect, Columbia University psychology professor Herb Terrace, and many others who had encountered Nim during his bizarre and tragic life.
'The emotional world of the film surprised me,' says Marsh. 'I was taken aback by the intensity of their feelings. Particularly Stephanie LaFarge, who was his 'mother' when he was a baby ... That became the theme of the story, that the people who had interacted with Nim had a really strong relationship with him, and described it in the same way they'd describe a relationship with a person.'
Project Nim is pieced together from talking-head interviews, archival footage, and dramatic recreations used to evoke scenes for which there was no existing footage. The result is a compelling narrative with unerring attention to authenticity. 'There are a wealth of ideas that you can ponder and perhaps enjoy,' says Marsh. 'Hopefully the story is sufficiently well told that you can encounter them.'
While it's possible to read Project Nim as a treatise on animal cruelty — as Nim matures and his animal nature asserts itself, he is removed from human 'family' environments into more controlled and even cruel laboratory or captivity settings — the film is not didactic. 'It invites the audience to reach their own conclusions,' says Marsh. 'But it's not my job to distil a cheap little moral.'
In fact, far from preachy, Project Nim is simply a compelling story, both humorous and moving, but with implicit questions that ask what it is to be human, as much as what it is to be animal.
'What the experiment does on a larger canvas is explore the whole idea of nature versus nurture. It asks "how much can we actually make Nim human?" ... It surprised me how powerful Nim's animal nature was. Irrespective of their attempts to domesticate and