On this day in vegan history · January 25, 2016
"Unlocking the Cage" Brings Chimpanzee Personhood to Sundance
A documentary crew that once trailed Bob Dylan and Depeche Mode spent years following a lawyer arguing, with a straight face, that a chimpanzee named Tommy deserves a writ of habeas corpus.
The facts
- Premiere
- Sundance Film Festival, Park City, Utah, January 25, 2016
- Directors
- D. A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus
- Subject
- Attorney Steven Wise and the Nonhuman Rights Project's habeas corpus cases for chimpanzees
- Later broadcast
- HBO, July 2016
Unlocking the Cage, directed by D. A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah on January 25, 2016. It follows attorney Steven Wise and the Nonhuman Rights Project as they file habeas corpus petitions in New York courts arguing that chimpanzees held in captivity, starting with one named Tommy, are cognitively complex enough to hold the legal right to bodily liberty. The film opens in a New York State appellate courtroom, the first time such an argument had been made before high court judges on behalf of an animal. It was Pennebaker's final film before his death in 2019, and it later aired on HBO that July.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
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Unlocking the Cage is a 2016 American documentary film about the work of the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) and lawyer Steven Wise's efforts to grant limited legal personhood rights to chimpanzees, whales, dolphins and elephants.
Wikipedia article on the film
Source: Wikipedia -
The movie opens in a New York State appellate courtroom, where, for the first time in history, an attorney goes before a group of high court judges to argue that the 'Great Writ' of habeas corpus should be applied on behalf of a chimpanzee, Tommy, who's living in a small cage in a dark shed at a rundown trailer park.
Nonhuman Rights Project, recounting the film's opening scene
Source: Nonhuman Rights Project
Why it still matters
The film carried a legal argument that had lived mostly in court filings and law reviews to a mainstream festival audience, forcing viewers to sit with the question of what, exactly, separates human rights from the rights of a captive, cognitively complex animal.
Sources
This history is still being written.
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