Creature Discomfort: Docu Explores the Long Rift Between Neighbors
Adding to the docu sub-genre of our ecological collapse, more of an observational docu than indictment, Nuisance Bear carries an unsettling air of accommodation toward a new reality shaped by dumb tourism, government oversight, and the slow erosion of Inuit traditions. A decade-long journey filled with alarming images of two things that should not be part of the same frame, Gabriela Osio Vanden and Jack Weisman offer a fascinating account about the thin line between protector and intruder — a shared space between the species where the polar bear community are indeed the collateral damage.
Our narrator observes that “even a small ripple can make a storm,” a line that quietly anticipates the film’s many points of imbalance. A solitary polar bear (he’ll be tagged, observed, honked at and almost made into a fur coat) wanders into a terrain defined by cameras, caution tape, and containment protocols, its ancient migration rerouted by a town that has grown around its very existence. As tourists arrive and officials step in, the question of who this land truly belongs to grows increasingly fraught.
Expanding on their proof-of-concept 2021 short, Vanden and Weisman return to Churchill, Manitoba, assembling a vivid visual ledger of a place where identity and industry have become inseparable. A measured, guiding voice (Mike Tunalaaq Gibbons) moves through the film, offering context without prescription, anchoring the spectacle in lived reality rather than tidy answers. One of the film’s most striking qualities is its intimacy. Osio Vanden and Weisman bring the camera alarmingly close to the bears: close enough to register individual teeth, labored breathing, the weight of a body moving through snow or town streets.
Also of note is Cristóbal Tapia de Veer’s ominous score underscores the unease, at times doing more narrative work than the film itself and at times sonically matches the encroachment and Blade Runner-esque oblique science-fiction wasteland terrain that this part of the North has become. Also handling cinematography duties, the tandem craft visuals of striking beauty and unease, repeatedly returning to the volatile point of contact between human and bear — one sedated, tagged, or herded; the other shielded by lenses, weapons, and bureaucratic procedure. Nuisance Bear is many things at once – a critical look at the traces the erosion of long-held practices and vanishing ways of life added to technological encroachment and human interference making for another tangle of unintended consequences.
Reviewed on January 29th (virtually) at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival (41st edition) – U.S. Documentary Competition section. 90 mins.
★★★/☆☆☆☆☆