Clever Monkeys

If you like monkeys you're going to love this one.   This film was a finalist in several categories at the JHWFF in 2009. For good reason too - its very well put together.  A narrator takes us through the life of monkeys.  It doesn't follow any one kind of monkey but instead looks at all monkeys in a type of academic look at how monkeys are somewhat similar to us.  Here is the description of the movie written in the JHWFF guide: 

An entertaining romp through the world of monkeys has a serious side - for when we look at monkeys we can see ourselves.  From memory to morality, from crying wolf to politics, monkeys are our basic blueprint.  Pygmy marmosets 'farm' tree sap; bearded capuchins in Brazil develop a production line for extracting palm nuts; white-faced capuchins in Costa Rica tenderly nurse the victims of battle; and in the Ethiopian highlands a deposed gelada baboon has got the blues.

Review:

This production is a well edited documentary about how ingenious monkeys are.  It is a humorous look at their societies and how we have a great deal of similarity to them.  Often, documentaries like this that are blue-chip (having no hosts or talking heads) get boring after a while.  This piece on the contrary tells a nice story.  I would recommend this video as a good animal behaviour documentary.  It should also be seen by students of anthropology because of its dicussion of how similar we are to to primates.