MOVIE OF THE MONTH: AUGUST 2011

                              PROJECT NiM

                                                      

Director                          : James Marsh
Director of photography: Michael Simmonds
Editor                             : Jinx Godfrey
Screenwriters                 : Elizabeth Hess
Distributor                      : Fox-Searchlight 
Release Date                  : 8 July 2011
Duration                         : 93 minutes

In November 1973, a two-week-old baby chimpanzee at a primate research center in Oklahoma is wrested screaming from his mother, who is knocked out by a tranquilizer dart, and transferred to the home of a female psychology researcher in a brownstone on New York. 

The ensuing research experiment is intended to show that chimpanzees, using sign language, can communicate with humans if nurtured like a human child. Because the experiment was intended to disprove some of linguist Noam Chomsky's theories about the exclusive inheritability of human language, the baby chimpanzee is dubbed "Nim Chimpsky". 

The experiment was initiated by Columbia University professor Herbert Terrace (he's still there). Several of the psychology researchers, including Stephane LaFarge, were also his graduate students and, apparently, lovers. LaFarge, married with children, and with only a rudimentary knowledge of sign language, made Nim a part of her household, which for her meant giving him puffs of marijuana and even breast-feeding him. 

His memory for people and places is extraordinary. He develops a vocabulary of 120 words. His favorite word is "play." But by age 5, Nim's animal nature comes to the fore – this development comes as something of a surprise to his touchy-feely caregivers – and Nim, alienated and anxious, is brought back to the primate research center in Oklahoma to live among his own species. 

Project Nim covers the 27 years of the real life of  Nim who was the the subject the subject of an extended study (codenamed 6.001) at Columbia University Reaearch Laboratory led byHerbert S. Terrace. The film utilises utilizes footage, interviews, and archival stills from throughout that time. For a film where so many people seem, in varying degrees, culpable, Marsh indulges in very little finger-pointing. He doesn't need to. The indignities are hiding in plain sight.

Film Review Courtesy:http://www.csmonitor.com/

Video Link: http://youtu.be/e_vha0FI0j8