"The imagery is startling. The story [...] hit even harder."—Kate Erbland, IndieWire
"Nuisance Bear defies categorization but offers wise insight through showing not telling. It’s subtle, affecting and unforgettable."—Randy Myers, San Jose Mercury News
For thousands of years, polar bears have migrated along the shores of Hudson Bay in northern Canada. Today, that ancient rhythm collides with a human world of tourism, surveillance, and control. Nuisance Bear immerses viewers in the experience of a polar bear forced to navigate tourists, wildlife officers, and hunters as climate change delays the freeze and pushes bears closer to human settlements. When a sacred predator is branded a “nuisance,” it becomes unclear who truly belongs in this shared landscape.
Returning to Churchill, Manitoba—the self-styled “Polar Bear Capital of the World”—filmmakers Gabriela Osio Vanden and Jack Weisman expand their award-winning 2021 short into a feature guided by an Inuit narrator whose perspective resists simplification. Shot with striking intimacy and scale, the film observes bears that are constantly monitored, photographed, and redirected. In tracing this uneasy coexistence, Nuisance Bear becomes a meditation on how humans manage, commodify, and redefine wildlife—overturning the conventions of the nature documentary and reframing animals not as spectacle, but as active agents in a rapidly changing world.