Project Nim

From the Oscar-winning 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.

The Academy has short-listed the film to be a nominee for the Best Feature Documentary Oscar.

Winner of the Best Directing Award for World Documentary at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival and voted the #1 documentary at the festival in the indieWIRE critics poll.

“A darkly hilarious social portrait of the bizarre alternate universe of 1970s academia and an extraordinary biography of a non-human individual, on whom all sorts of human desires and ideologies were projected.” (Andrew O’Hehir, Salon)