In 1973, when he was a few days old, a baby chimpanzee named Nim was taken from his mother and given to a new ‘mother’: a graduate student of psychology with three children living in Manhattan. In a radical experiment to demonstrate that primates could communicate language, Nim was to live exclusively with humans and hopefully learn enough to communicate his thoughts and feelings. Within a few months, Nim is confidently speaking in sign language, all the while wrecking the house and seemingly intent on destroying the human relationships within it. James Marsh (Man on Wire) pieces together the extraordinary story of Nim’s life as he moves through a series of carers, and ultimately returns to the cage he was born into. While there are evidently many intriguing overlaps between humans and chimps, the film highlights that it’s the differences between the species that really shape Nim’s life and determine his unhappy fate.

(Sheffield)