Frederick Wiseman and cinematographer William Brayne turn their camera on the daily work at Atlanta's Yerkes National Primate Research Center. They observe scientists conducting various experiments—from language and memory tests to aggression control and surgical dissection. The film captures both the precision of the research and moments of distress as researchers debate methods and animals endure their procedures. This documentary explores the fine line between the pursuit of knowledge and the practice of cruelty, asking whether scientific discovery can ever justify its cost.

 Shot at the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center in Atlanta, Primate observes ongoing behavioral studies of chimpanzees, monkeys, and orangutans—what Wiseman and cinematographer William Brayne, over two months of filming, likened to a “barbed-wire jungle.” With the camera often fixed behind rows of fencing, the film records the uneasy standoff between a lack of human empathy and the deprivation of animal autonomy.

It is Wiseman at his most signature: leisurely, repetitive, without narration, and all the more unsettling for its restraint. Many sequences are deeply disturbing—filled with dissections, transplants, and other invasive procedures that will unsettle even the strongest stomachs. But Wiseman studies the scientists as closely as the primates, revealing their clinical detachment, their obsessions, their petty jokes about funding, and—above all—the shocking narrowness of their worldview.

A board meeting on artificial insemination becomes an inadvertent study in human behavior itself, as the camera lingers on yawns, nose-picking, and vacant stares. What emerges is a work that quietly but powerfully interrogates the tensions between science, compassion, and the rational and spiritual dimensions of our own nature. Primate is as much about the people conducting the research as it is about the animals in their charge—and about the thin, uneasy line between observation and complicity.

• ProducerFrederick WISEMAN
• Cinematography Bill BRAYNE
• Edit Frederick WISEMAN
• Sound Frederick WISEMAN

Zipporah Films​​