Documentary: Project Nim

On Sunday night SBS screens the documentary Project Nim, the story of a radical 1970s experiment to break down the barrier between man and a chimp.

In the 1970s a baby chimpanzee called Nim became the focus of a landmark experiment. The chimp would be raised like a child and taught sign language in the hope he would acquire the words to express what he was thinking and feeling; to communicate as a human.

Adopted by a succession of young female Columbia University students, Nim was an exceptionally fast learner and in a few months could communicate his desires through sign language.

However as he grew older and larger, Nim’s animal nature began to emerge and he became a danger and a threat to his human family. At the age of 5, Nim’s existence in human society was stopped, the experiment abandoned. Nim was reintroduced to life as a chimp living amongst his own kind, yet was heartbreakingly caught somewhere between the human world and the animal kingdom.

Project Nim is an unflinching and unsentimental biography of the journey of the animal we tried to make human. The complex lessons about Nim’s true nature, and indeed the nature of humankind, are comic, revealing and profoundly unsettling.

Sunday, 26 October at 9.30pm on SBS ONE.