Listening to the the emotional confessions that make up PROJECT NIM, I found one question repeating in my head:

With how emotionally involved all the scientists were getting in the experiment, how could they possibly have counted on purely quantifiable mathematic results?

You might set out to prove that it’s possible to create a drug that will make two people fall in love…but if they get into close quarters and fall in love anyway, your entire equation is shot to hell anyway. Isn’t it?

PROJECT NIM is all about a Columbia University research study from the mid 1970’s. Back then Professor Herbert Terrace wanted to prove that a chimpanzee could learn sign language if nurtured by human parents almost from the moment of birth. His subject – a charmer of a simian named “Nim” – was taken from his mother after being born in captivity and raised by scientists and researchers at Columbia.

What PROJECT NIM shows us, is that the well-meaning imagination of 1970’s science might have wanted to prove nurture over nature, however the real experiment came down to how these scientists interacted with each other. Marriages were tested, affairs were carried on, jealousy caused division, and differences in method came into play over and over again.

The film wants to tell a tale of animal rights, but for my money it’s a story of human underestimation. Brought to us by director James Marsh (the same man who gave us MAN ON WIRE), the film combines archival video and photography with a few imaginative touches to bridge the gaps. Nim is clearly the star of the show, but the people who cared for him and tried to better understand him are the ones that makes us alternately listen-up and shake our heads.

Nim seems to be continually stuck between divorcing parents, all of them asking him who he wants to live with and waiting for him to make whatever gesture correlates to a choice. The purpose of the research is never really explained (Swell, you can talk to a chimp. Now what?), and it would seem as though it was all laid out with no end-game in mind. Thus the take-a-way for the story is wondering what was crueller. Is it that poor Nim was recruited for these experiments, and put into situations that an animal shouldn’t be subjected to? Or is it that the scientists who put him there didn’t have a good enough grip on what they were doing – and worse, contaminated any results the did get with unquantifiable emotional influence?

PROJECT NIM is a powerful film, and one that will engage for many reasons. It wants to tell a story of an experiment, the subject of the experiment, and the people performing the experiment in equal measure. It exposes true horrors, and unforeseen results without holding anything back. And if that hasn’t sparked enough interest, perhaps you’d like to see it just to watch a chimp smoke a joint.

PROJECT NIM plays Hot Docs once more: Friday May 6th – 10 am at Isabel Bader Theatre