Gabriela Osio Vanden and Jack Weisman’s Nuisance Bear is an expansion of their 2021 short film of the same name, which followed a polar bear on its annual migration through Churchill, Manitoba, the “Polar Bear Capital of the World.” Through visual storytelling alone, they captured not only the behavior of the animal but also the increasingly politicized environment that bears have had to adapt to in modern times. One aspect of this environment is the Churchill wildlife management program, which rounds up Avinnaarjuk, or “nuisance bears,” and keeps them in a holding facility until they are ready to be transported north. Another aspect is the town’s booming tourism industry, which offers people the chance to see polar bears in the wild, and which was beautifully encapsulated in a slow-motion tracking shot of a bear nonchalantly crossing a road while a dozen or so tourists scrambled to get the perfect picture. This tension between profit and protection, between exploitation and conservation, is explored in much more depth in Vanden and Weisman’s latest feature, thanks to yet more stunning compositions and some crucial historical context provided by Inuit narrator Mike Tunalaaq Gibbons.
The polar bear’s journey is split into two parts. The first part begins with the bear’s entry into Churchill and ends with its being airlifted out of town by helicopter. Scenes of wildlife officers on patrol and tourists on bear-spotting expeditions are interspersed with the bear’s ceaseless hunt for food, which in one particularly intense scene means trying to grab some meat from one end of a trap without triggering the ominous metal gate at the other. In the second part, we move with the bear to Arviat, Nunavut, which is the next town north of Churchill and home to a largely Inuit community. Gibbons recounts how white colonizers tried to stamp out the Inuit language and way of life, resulting in the breakdown of family networks and generational ties. We also see snippets of town hall discussions about bear activity and management, the operational challenges of safeguarding a town from them during Halloween, and preparations for the annual bear harvest.
Although there are many dramatic moments—the scenes of trucks and helicopters shooing bears out of town often look like high-speed chases—the main tone is one of socioecological reflection. As Gibbons makes clear, the pernicious contradictions that characterize the current situation in Churchill—for instance, that the profitability of the tourism trade is to a large extent dependent on the vulnerability of the bears—is inextricably linked to the colonization and exploitation of the Inuit communities, and, more generally, to the attitudes and values that continue to make that oppression possible. Only in a system built on profit and power could well-meaning conservation work require that polar bears continually be sent further north, where they inevitably trouble rural communities who had no problems with them before, or that conservation workers set terrifying traps, use deafening firecrackers as deterrents, and tranquilize stranded bears for nibbling garbage.
As Murray Bookchin points out in this brilliant lecture, our attitudes towards the natural world are extensions of the social relations that exist between human beings. If those social relations are built on ideas of domination and exploitation, so will our attitudes towards the natural world. It is hard to watch Nuisance Bear and not see, for example, that the adversarial nature of the conservation program in Churchill—from the process of forcefully rounding up the bears to the use of so-called “polar bear jails”—is an obvious translation, both in spirit and practice, of many countries’ policies towards immigrants. Likewise, the anger and frustration that many Inuit communities now feel towards the bears, after having lived in relative peace with them for generations, is an expression of capitalism’s drive to eradicate Indigenous knowledge and more egalitarian ways of life. Gibbons puts it most succinctly towards the end of the film: “Everything is interconnected. There is no separation between ourselves and nature. This story of a bear is a story about us.”
Nuisance Bear premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.