Project Nim at the Elinor Bunin Monroe Film Center

The experience of seeing chimpanzees in the wild, which we were lucky enough to do in Uganda in 2009, etches itself into your being. A frisson of recognition and kinship exists simultaneously with an acute awareness of the yawning gap that a 2% genetic difference creates, making for an unforgettable sensation of proximity and distance. From the first moments of Project Nim, it is clear that few of the people who populate the movie gave much thought to what that narrow but real distinction meant when they attempted to raise the chimpanzee they called Nim Chimpsky in human company. There are fascinating things to be learned about great apes' cognitive capacity if rigorous scientific and ethical principles are adhered to, as at the Great Ape Trust, but the folly and inanity that mark Nim's heartbreaking story --- partly a tale of a vanished New York, partly a reflection on how people destroy the things they think they love --- left the packed house at the brand new Elinor Bunin Monroe Film Center gasping and crying and seething with outrage. The repeated efforts of even the well-intentioned people in Nim's life to wash their hands of responsibility through insouciant appeals to "science," wry retreats to context ("It was the 70s"), or pitiable descents into New Age nonsense ("We failed this trusting soul") make you want to shake them and say: No, it wasn't science, it wasn't the 70s, and it wasn't about souls: it was immoral and you should be punished. 
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