Project Nim - Movie TrailerProject Nim, from the Oscar winning director behind 2008's fascinating documentary, Man on Wire, is the story of a 1970s-era scientific project to determine if Chimpanzees can be taught to learn and functionally use American sign language. The project, led by scientist Herbert S. Terrace beginning in 1973 as a counter to Noam Chomsky's theory that language is inherent only to humans, has been widely disputed and even resulted in a fairly significant bitch fight among scientists who refuted the results of all experiments on chimpanzees and their ability to learn language. Regardless, from what we see in the trailer, the film appears to be cute, engaging and pleasantly nostalgic.

The trailer has debuted over on Apple.com and can be watched there in hi-definition or you can also see it below in the embedded player.

Project Nim (the movie) is directed by James Marsh and premiered at this year's Sundance Film Festival and will release to theaters on July 8th.

 

From the Oscar-winning team behind MAN ON WIRE comes the story of Nim, the chimpanzee who in the 1970s 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. Following Nim's extraordinary journey through human society, and the enduring impact he makes on the people he meets along the way, the film 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.