Live at Preservation Hall: Louisiana Fairytale
Synopsis
From director James Marsh and the Oscar-winning team behind Man on Wire comes the story of Nim, the chimpanzee. In the 1970s, Nim 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. Under the auspices of a psychology professor at Columbia University, the chimp would be taught the sign language of the deaf and it was hoped he would soon acquire enough words and grammar to tell us what he was thinking and feeling. If successful, the consequences would be profound, forever breaking down the barrier between man and his closest animal relative and fundamentally redefining what it is to be human. Following Nim’s extraordinary journey through human society, and the enduring impact he makes on the people he meets along the way, Project Nim 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.
