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”.
Grand Jury Prize: U.S. Documentary Competition, Sundance 2026
Oct 9, 10 & 11: Filmmaker Q&A
Media Partner
Community Partner
USA/Canada
2026
In Inuktitut and English with English subtitles
At Alliance Française & SFU Woodwards
At Fifth Ave
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Credits & Director
Executive Producer
Joe Karetak, Eric Anoee, Nicole Stott, Emily Osborne, Harry Go, Nicole Quintero Ochoa, Moudhy Al-Rashid, Sam Frohman, Alex Pritz
Producer
Michael Code, Will N. Miller, Teddy Leifer
Cinematography
Gabriela Osio Vanden, Jack Weisman, Michael Code, Sam Holling, Ian Kerr, Jack Gawthrop
Editor
Andres Landau
Original Music
Cristóbal Tapia de Veer
Gabriela Osio Vanden
Gabriela Osio Vanden is a Venezuelan-Canadian director and cinematographer based in Toronto. A HotDocs 2022 Fellow, her images have premiered at major festivals including TIFF, Camerimage, SXSW, IDFA, Sheffield DocFest, and True/False. Her student thesis film The Rambler (2016) was awarded an internship with Phedon Papamichael ASC GSC, whom she shadowed on Alexander Payne’s Downsizing (2017). Her short Nuisance Bear (2022) played at over 120 film festivals, won multiple awards (most notably a Critics Choice Award and Outstanding Non-Fiction Short at Cinema Eye Honors), and was shortlisted for the 95th Academy Awards.
Jack Weisman
Jack Weisman aspires to make visually striking and original films that defy easy classification. His works of creative non-fiction have premiered at many festivals including Sundance, SXSW, TIFF, and IDFA. His breakout short, Nuisance Bear (2022), co-directed with Gabriela Osio Vanden, received widespread acclaim, earning a spot on the 95th Academy Award Shortlist, two Emmy nominations, and awards at Cinema Eye Honors, Critics’ Choice Documentary Awards, and IDA Documentary Awards. Weisman is a co-founder of Documist, an Emmy- and Peabody-winning production company based in New York and Toronto.
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