Jane Goodall's colleagues objected that she named the chimpanzees and attributed feelings to them. She turned out to be right. Brett Morgen's documentary asks what kind of attention made that possible.

When Jane Goodall arrived at Gombe in 1960, she brought almost no scientific training and a set of habits her colleagues would spend years trying to correct. She named the chimpanzees. She described their behaviour in emotional terms. She allowed, over time, something that looked uncomfortably like relationship to develop between herself and the animals she was studying. These were methodological violations, by the standards of the discipline. They were also, it turned out, the conditions that made her discoveries possible.

Brett Morgen's documentary reconstructs her early years in the field largely through the footage shot by Hugo van Lawick, the wildlife filmmaker who later became her husband. It is extraordinary material — Goodall moving through the forest, patient and unhurried, gradually accepted into proximity by animals that had every reason to keep their distance. Morgen's formal choice to build the film around this archive rather than conventional interview-led narration mirrors something essential about its subject. We are asked to watch, carefully, over time. The meaning accumulates rather than being announced.

What the footage captures, and what the film quietly argues, is that Goodall's empathy was not softness or sentimentality. It was a method — perhaps the most rigorous one available for the particular problem she was trying to solve. The chimpanzees did not reveal their social structures, their emotional lives, their capacity for grief and joy and political calculation to observers who kept their distance. They revealed them to someone who stayed, who paid attention without agenda, who extended toward them something that can only be described as regard.

Her scientific contemporaries were not wrong that this approach carried risks. Projection is a real danger — reading human experience into non-human behaviour is a way of finding what you brought rather than what is there. But the alternative, treating observed behaviour as data stripped of interior life, turned out to carry its own distortions. The question Goodall's career keeps posing is not whether to bring empathy to observation, but how to bring it carefully — how to remain genuinely open to what is there rather than confirming what you expected.

Empathy extended toward a chimpanzee in the Tanzanian forest is an extreme case, and usefully so. It tests the concept at its edges, asks how far attention and regard can travel across difference, and suggests that the answer may be further than the prevailing assumptions of any given moment allow. Goodall's work didn't just expand what we knew about chimpanzees. It expanded what we thought empathy was for.