National Geographic's Jane Goodall: My Life With the Chimpanzees [VHS]

This is a well-made documentary with excellent footage, a complementary musical score, and a well-organized narrative that gives viewers a full portrait of a woman who, in 1960, went alone into the heart of Africa at the age of 26 and remained there for decades studying chimpanzees.

Louis Leakey chose Goodall's vocation for her. As his secretary she did not think she had the proper qualifications to study chimps, but he knew otherwise. He sent her to Gombe National Park in Tanzania. The details of Goodall's life given in this video describe not only why Goodall chose such an unusual life but how she has been able to do it, giving the viewer a reason to care about her and in turn about the chimps.

By observing the chimp societies for three decades, she discovered that they used tools, and though she originally thought they were more gentle than humans, she learned they had a dark side too. In 1975 four of her students were kidnapped by armed rebels from Zaire and were held for 10 weeks. Goodall was harshly criticized for caring more about her research than about her students. Confronting the controversy on film makes for fascinating dialogue as Goodall defends herself.

In Jane Goodall: My Life with the Chimpanzees, viewers will learn as much about this incredibly outspoken woman as about the chimps. Her crusade to save them in the wild (at the time of the filming there were only 160 chimps left in Gombe National Park) is extremely important, as is her campaign to improve the situations of chimps in zoos or in laboratories living in horrible conditions. A visit to the chimp cages in a U.S. lab is done with utmost taste but is still mind-blowing. With a smile and mimicking a chimp's hello, Goodall gently forces us all to question the ethics of animal testing. --Cristina Del Sesto

Price: $19.98

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