James Marsh returned to Edinburgh International Film Festival last month with his sophomore feature documentary, Project Nim. His last film, Man on Wire, which saw Frenchman Philippe Petit tightrope walk across New York City’s Twin Towers, had its European Premiere at the same festival in 2008 and went on to win an Academy Award for Best Documentary. I caught up with the Oscar-winner to find out more about the life and times of Nim Chimpsky.

“Project Nim is the story about a chimpanzee that’s taken from its family when it’s born and given to a human family to bring up as if it were a human child,” says Marsh. “The idea is to see if it can learn language in the way that human children do. In a sense it’s about nature and nurture: a chimp has a certain nature, so what will come out when he’s brought up a human being will be very interesting. The film takes that idea and then follows this chimpanzee from the moment he’s born until he dies.”

Drawing upon a wealth of archive footage from the 1970s language experiment led by Dr Herbert Terrace at Colombia University, Marsh tells the story of the beleaguered study that attempted to identify whether chimpanzees were able to understand and communicate using American Sign Language. Linguistics were at the heart of the study, but its trajectory took on a series of human-ape relationships with progressively more baffling, questionable, and dangerous consequences.

Alongside staged interviews with key characters — including the project director; the family with whom Nim first resided; and Nim’s human teachers — archive footage and voiceover narratives meld to give a bigger, more intense, and ultimately hindsight rich history of events. Is there a trick to to finding engaging interview subjects? “I think the reason they’re good storytellers is because this means something to them. They have a very strong memory of something that meant something to them in their lives,” says Marsh. “So there’s a big imprint of that story on them and I think that they’re able to tell that story well, but also to tell that with feeling and to connect back to how they felt at that time.” Indeed, as Nim is ushered from a private school all his own to an Oklahoma sanctuary, and eventually into horrific AIDS animal-testing labs, the timeline of the film grows dark. “Many of the people involved have a lot of regret about what happened and I think that also prompts them to be more confessional, perhaps, about what they went through while spending time with the chimpanzee.”

Taking a cinematic approach to documentary story-telling, Marsh weaves simple reconstructions with engrossing interviews to tell the life story of a subject that’s almost human. “We’re so often sentimental about animal’s behaviour and projecting things onto them. This was an attempt to see what the animal is actually like.” Marsh himself identifies with Nim on a close-to-human level “What I liked about Nim more than anything else that he showed me was that he is by nature a hedonist, and so am I. Therefore, we’re hard-wired, he and I. Nim likes to take drugs and smoke cigarettes when he can, and I’m the same.” Though there are more similarities of which to speak, doing so might spoil the surprise. “There’s some very big surprises in Nim’s story that I’d rather find out for yourself.”

Along with surprises, there are a number of elements of Nim’s story that Marsh is charged with missing out. As is inevitable in feature filmmaking, Marsh chose the human story of relationships with Nim over the scientific background of the experiment. Shrinking down the science has reportedly sparked aggrieved comments from Dr Terrace, but Marsh has confidence. “There were quite a few stories that, you know, you leave out because you’re trying to make a film efficient. If I’ve done my job right I’m telling you a story,” says Marsh, pointedly, “and if I told the story well enough it has many different ideas in it.”

Project Nim is released in US from Friday 8 July, and in UK cinemas on Friday 12 August.

Meet Monica Velour is a new take on the mature American woman role for Sex and the City girl Kim Cattrall. Visiting Scotland on a special guest appearance to the Edinburgh International Film Festival, I caught up with her to discuss the role. Transforming herself into ex-1970s porn star Monica Velour’s self-ego Linda Romanoli saw her gain 20lbs and peel back the layers of a lady of the late-night movies who is past her best. “You really have to be on your toes in independent films. It was an amazing opportunity to do a transformation that I’ve never had a chance to do before.”

Pursued by Tobe, a compulsive high-school graduate with a penchant for 1970s porn and its biggest star, Monica Velour. Making a pilgrimage across the Midwest to meet her at an Indiana strip club, a stark introduction that revelas the reality of her sad existence.

“I started to create this character with Keith [Bearden, director] from the bottom up. The way she speaks, the way she looks, the way she talks, her body language, what her life has been like before – really creating a life other than what was in the script. She smokes, she does drugs, she’s had this kind of life, she’s burned out. Everything about that so informed what we were going for in terms of this woman’s given circumstances.”

Though her celebrity status has long since faded, Tobe’s feeble pursuits marry the downtrodden with the downright weird, lending a smattering of to comic moments to proceedings.

Despite some tough subject matter, the film is imbued with a real feeling of heart. “The humanity of the story was not that she was a porn star or a stripper or any of that – it was that she was a mother fighting for the custody of her daughter. She’s got great humour, a dignity and strength.”

Cattrall’s performance is the highlight of the film, festival fodder with clever asides but not quite enough oomph to push it into cinemas. Now released on DVD, the best way to Meet Monica Velour is at your rental website of choice.

Meet Monica Velour is available to buy now on DVD.

Clad in grey clothes and golden complexions, Hailsham students are special creatures. Raised to fulfil a very specific biological purpose in an age where life expectancy exceeds 100, their lives are empty vessels propelled directly from preschool to school, through adolescence, and directly into respite centres where they care for, or become, donors. Placing futuristic scientific treatments into a period setting (in this case, 1970s), is immediately unsettling.

Growing up at Hailsham, we are introduced to Cathy (Carey Mulligan), Tommy (Andrew Garfield), and Ruth (Keira Knightley) in a point-by-point set-up of their curious lives. Though the child actors of Never Let Me Go feel somewhat Harry Potter-ish, though, their gossipy cliques and painfully childish competition are offset by a stellar performance from Sally Hawkins. As newcomer Miss Lucy who connects with and battles with a desire to enlighten these strange children, her questioning glances and tidy, unpracticed explanations inject a healthy dose of unrehearsed realism to a world thick with convention and rules. Though the film makes berth at Hailsham, it really begins when Cathy and co are sent to farmhouses known as ‘the Cottages’ in the English countryside. A fragile-looking teen, Cathy carries her questions and insecurities in her wan frame, quietly searching for the answers behind their strange existence.

Best friend and crush Tommy, sequestered from Cathy’s affections by Ruth, is poignantly played by an adorably naive Andrew Garfield. Their innate chemistry and inept fondness carries a sincerity as hapless as it is heartbreaking. The disjointed, bitty selection of plot incidences from Ishiguro’s novel are bound together thus; betraying the undercurrents of a relationship between friends shackled together for life in the confines of huge, constricting homes and stifling rumours.

Stories grow up around them as they meander through life with their awkward make-do trinkets and fashion sense. Like Ishiguro’s students, they share an intoned way of speaking that’s at once innocent and world-weary, all the while conveying a the cramped egos of children denied the love and nurturing of growing up. Stunning locations and beautiful set design converge with a subtly piercing pallette, melding real English countryside and old town beauty with a world that’s not quite our own. Though initially piecemeal, Romanek’s vision transforms Ishiguro’s ethereal novel of questions into a well-crafted story of tragic love.

Never Let Me Go is released on DVD in the UK on 27 June.