Nuisance Bear

Churchill, Manitoba sells itself as the “Polar Bear Capital of the World,” but what happens when the mascot becomes a problem? In their debut feature, Canadian filmmakers Gabriela Osio Vanden and Jack Weisman track a polar bear through encounters with tourists, trucks, sirens, traps, wildlife officers, hunters, and relocation. The town profits from ursine spectacle, but Vanden and Weisman portray bears as neither scenery nor symbol. Instead, the bear becomes our protagonist, trapped in a system built to watch, sell, manage, and remove it.

Nuisance Bear overturns the nature documentary from the inside. Every chase, stare, and shutter click asks who is really intruding on whom. Moving between Churchill and the Inuit community of Arviat — with guidance and narration from late Inuit elder Mike Tunalaaq Gibbons — the film touches on issues of climate crisis, conservation, tourism, colonial settlement, and coexistence. Winner of the highly coveted Sundance Grand Jury Prize for Documentary, this is a formally daring work about spectacle, survival, and the violence hidden inside the word “nuisance”.