Something to watch tonight: Wednesday 27 November

Project Nim (Marsh, 2011)

This week back in 2011, my Capital Times column fea­tured the fourth Twilight film (“I’ve spent 493 minutes in the Twilight uni­verse, at least 492 of them wish­ing I was some­where else.”), Rachel Weisz in the thrill­er The Whistleblower fea­tur­ing Benedict Cumberbatch as a rogue CIA agent, and Snow Flower and the Secret Fan which was pro­duced by Rupert Murdoch’s wife-at-the-time Wendi Deng – “tep­id at best and no amount of Hugh Jackman awk­wardly singing and dan­cing can warm it up.”

But the pick of that week was a doc­u­ment­ary about a chimpanzee:

Project Nim is a doc­u­ment­ary about a fam­ous (or notori­ous) exper­i­ment to teach human sign lan­guage to a chim­pan­zee and see what happened next. What fol­lowed that brain­wave was a series of decisions (start­ing with the forced remov­al of baby Nim from his moth­er) that man­age to illu­min­ate cruel human beha­viour rather more than the interi­or life of the chimp.

The Columbia University study was well-documented – by the aca­dem­ics as well as a curi­ous media – so there’s a lot of fas­cin­at­ing mater­i­al for the film­makers to draw on. I’m not as con­vinced by the shad­owy recre­ations that are some­times used to fill in the gaps.

Your cor­res­pond­ent saw Project Nim not long after the excel­lent Rise of the Planet of the Apes which covered sim­il­ar, yet more fant­ast­ic­al, ter­rit­ory. They would make a good double feature.

Where to watch Project Nim

Aotearoa and Australia: Streaming on DocPlay

Canada: Streaming on Knowledge

Ireland: Digital rental

India: Not cur­rently available

USA: Streaming on Kanopy

UK: Streaming on ITVx