Chimp's bio: A sad tale of hubris

What would it mean for an animal to talk? What indeed separates an animal from a human? These questions are raised in a new documentary about a chimpanzee named Nim Chimpsky, the subject of a radical language experiment in the 1970s.

The film, "Project Nim," is named after the study, which began in 1973 with an infant Nim living with a Manhattan family and ended after much tribulation in a Texas animal sanctuary, where he died in 2000.

"Like any biography, you focus on one life, and you encounter many other lives in the slipstream of that life," said James Marsh, the director, whose 2008 documentary "Man on Wire," about Philippe Petit, the World Trade Center tightrope walker, won an Oscar. Thus the film quickly becomes as much about the human emotions surrounding its star as it is about Nim.