Carrie McLaren is a guest blogger at Boing Boing and coauthor of Ad Nauseam: A Survivor’s Guide to American Consumer Culture. She lives in Brooklyn, the former home of her now defunct Stay Free! magazine.
Though I consider myself an ape enthusiast, I’ve never really cottoned to movies starring chimps. Chimps dressed in clothing performing slapstick gags just isn’t my thing. Documentaries about primates usually aren’t much better; they tend to be dry and humorless, sucking all the spirit out of their subjects while portraying their depressing circumstances. Also, there’s just something incongruous about watching “nature” documentaries on TV screens. But People of the Forest: The Chimps of Gombe transcends all this. In a word, it’s awesome. The documentary draws on 20 years of footage to tell the stories of a group of chimps that Jane Goodall followed in Gombe, Tanzania. It’s as sweet and funny and heart-rending as any great feature film. Highly recommended. (The movie is out of print, but Amazon has a few copies, or you may be able to get it via P2P.)