Don’t Miss ‘SENTIENT’: A Scientist’s Reckoning, a Limited-Time Screening
What made a scientist turn against the primate experimentation industry she spent decades working in? Find out in SENTIENT. Join the live screening and Q&A on December 10 at 8 p.m. EST—or watch on demand December 11–14. Get your tickets now—this screening window won’t last!
For more than three decades, Dr. Lisa Jones-Engel worked inside the system that uses monkeys and other primates for experiments. She was a field primatologist, a primate scientist, a Fulbright scholar, and a member of a university animal testing oversight committee.
Then she reached a point when she could no longer justify her part in the animal experimentation industry.
SENTIENT follows her extraordinary journey from animal experimenter to scientific advisor for PETA. Through firsthand accounts, archival footage, undercover video, and testimony from scientists and former laboratory workers, the documentary lays bare the devastating cost of experiments on monkeys while examining the toll the industry takes on the humans involved.
And it asks a question that is impossible to ignore: If we know these individuals think, feel, love, fear, and suffer, how can we treat them like test subjects?
SENTIENT premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival’s World Cinema Documentary Competition before making its way to major film festivals around the world and earning critical acclaim, including a 2026 Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival audience award. Now you can see SENTIENT from home during these limited virtual screenings.
Limited Time Only: Watch SENTIENT December 10–14
Choose from two limited-time viewing options:
Live Virtual Screening: December 10 at 8 p.m. EST ($4.99, or pay-what-you-wish)
Watch SENTIENT on December 10, then stay for the live Q&A with Dr. Lisa Jones-Engel and director Tony Jones. Get your ticket now and mark your calendar for 8 p.m. EST.
On-Demand Screening: December 11–14 ($6.99)
Can’t join live? Don’t miss your chance to see SENTIENT from home. The on-demand screening window runs December 11–14 only. Get your ticket now and choose your watch date.
- Watch anytime from December 11 through 14.
- Once you start the film, you’ll have up to 48 hours to finish watching through December 14.
The live and on-demand screenings require separate tickets.
She Spent Decades Inside the System. Then Everything Changed.
Jones-Engel’s relationship with other primates stretches back decades. But in 1988, she spent significant time tending to infant chimpanzees who had been taken from their mothers while working at a New York University laboratory. She grew especially close to three: Digger, Regis, and Kareem. In SENTIENT, Jones-Engel reveals how getting to know these chimpanzees as individuals, each with unique personalities, preferences, and relationships, began to change the way she viewed the work she was doing.
To be sentient means to have feelings and experiences, including pain and pleasure. As Jones-Engel explains in the film:
“There is no doubt in my mind that these animals are sentient. You look into their eyes, and the connection is immediate. The realization is that, ‘This being, who looks physically nothing like me, is just another version of me.’”
—Dr. Lisa Jones-Engel, SENTIENT
Today at PETA, Dr. Lisa Jones-Engel works to get animals out of laboratories and shut down primate research centers.
Being an animal liberation advocate was never part of her original plan. In her words: “They made me what I am.”
SENTIENT makes the stakes clear: The world desperately needs us to end experimentation on animals, and human patients deserve science rooted in human biology.
Don’t Miss SENTIENT—and Don’t Keep It to Yourself
SENTIENT is about much more than what happens inside laboratories.
It is about mothers desperately trying to hold on to their babies, monkeys clinging to one another when they’re terrified, individuals with unmistakable personalities and relationships, and scientists and laboratory workers who reached a point when they could no longer be complicit.
Get your ticket, mark your calendar, and invite someone who has never questioned experiments on animals to watch with you. Then share this screening opportunity while there’s still time.
Get Your Tickets Now—These Limited-Time Screenings Won’t Last
LIVE VIRTUAL SCREENING
December 10 | 8 p.m. EST | Followed by a Q&A
ON-DEMAND SCREENING
December 11–14 | Watch on your schedule
