What works better is the film’s last third, in which it becomes clear - shockingly, at least for Western audiences - that some of the scientific trainees at the institute don’t believe in the Theory of Evolution, mainly because of their religion. Scenes such as the presence of some of the people working at the institute at a kind of nationalist memorial service are difficult to place without further context, especially because the direct connection to the institute is less obvious here. But the parallels don’t always completely line up or are fully comprehensible because the film isn’t a history lesson about either communism or recent Abkhaz history, so some background knowledge of the socio-political situation is required. There are a lot of similarities, of course, as the Soviet form of communism was also doomed to fail and finally collapsed in the late 1980s, just like the institute did, and Abkhazia, not recognized by most countries in the world, is now in a state of political limbo.

Indeed, animals lovers will generally find the film a hard sit, but there’s one cute “awww” moment when a member of the staff does the dishes at home with a baby rhesus macaque attached to her leg while the family’s cat looks on with curiosity. One of the very few male scientists has worked there for 50 years, while a few of the female employees seem to have turned into the simian equivalents of cat ladies, taking care of a lot of the animals and even taking them home when necessary and promising to keep their favorites away from any new medical tests. Solomon lets the employees that work there - no one is introduced by name or captioned - talk about their day-to-day activities as they show the crew around the institute, occasionally diving into the place’s glorious history as well. Further adding to the almost sci-fi like atmosphere of crazy scientists and their secret laboratories is the fact that the institute reportedly tried to create a simian-human hybrid in Soviet times, an experiment that was doomed to fail because of biological incompatibility. This creates an eerie dissonance between the flickering images of the past, when the future seemed boundless and bright, and the near-empty and dilapidated state of the establishment in the present. In an elegant yet straightforward visual sleight-of-hand, some of the archive footage is actually projected on the walls of the rooms containing some of the caged animals. The particular history of the institute - which was founded by endocrinologists in 1927, when testicle grafting was in vogue (hence the odd title) - is told through a combination of archive footage and Solomon and cinematographer Radu Gorgos’ presence at a quick guided tour of the three small museum rooms of the institute.

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