HBO Partners with Roadside Attractions for PROJECT NIM

HBO has partnered with Roadside Attractions for U.S. theatrical and DVD rights to PROJECT NIM, the 2011 Sundance Film Festival opener in the World Cinema Documentary Competition, it was announced today by Sheila Nevins, president, HBO Documentary Films and Howard Cohen, co-president, Roadside Attractions. The film will go out theatrically through Roadside Attractions, on television through HBO and on DVD through Lionsgate.

From the Oscar(R)-winning team behind "Man on Wire," director James Marsh and producer Simon Chinn, comes the story of Nim, a chimpanzee who in the 1970s became the focus of a landmark experiment that 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, PROJECT NIM is an unflinching and unsentimental biography of an animal the experiment tried to make human.

The deal was negotiated by HBO, Submarine's Josh Braun and Roadside Attractions' Howard Cohen.

"James Marsh and I are absolutely thrilled to be working with Roadside Attractions and HBO Documentary Films on the U.S. theatrical release of PROJECT NIM," noted producer Simon Chinn. "Their combined track record in championing award-winning documentaries speaks for itself."

PROJECT NIM is a Roadside Attractions release of an HBO Documentary Films, BBC Films and UK Film Council presentation of a Red Box Films Production in association with Passion Pictures.