Nuisance Bear Review: This One’s Just Right

Nuisance Bear
(USA/Canada, 90 min.)
Dir. Gabriela Osio Vanden, Jack Weisman
Prod. Michael Code, Will N. Miller, Teddy Leifer
Programme: U.S. Documentary Competition (World premiere)

 

Here’s a documentary that’s smarter than the average bear. Nuisance Bear brilliantly expands the 2021 short documentary that shares its name. That’s high praise for filmmakers Gabriela Osio Vanden and Jack Weisman, who already had an extraordinary work to begin with. Nuisance Bear, the short, makes smart use of its economic 15-minute running time with a dizzying tracking shot that follows a polar bear through Churchill, Manitoba as a gaggle of tourists snaps pictures of the animal as it’s forced off its natural migration path due to climate change. The feature furthers many of the ideas explored in the short, but with a cinematic eye that elevates the material on every level. This is a beautifully shot and artistically innovative environmental fable that masterfully connects the layers of colonial history within the contemporary climate crisis.

Nuisance Bear refreshingly finds a new cinematic vision with which it opens up the story. This time, Osio Vanden and Weisman favour a free-flowing essayistic observational film. The documentary again takes audiences to Churchill, the “polar bear capital of the world.” The passage of time, moreover, means good news for the filmmakers if it’s bad news for the bears. There are more bears and more tourists to see here, maybe in part because of the popularity of the short (although surely only for the latter). The poetic style lets the short film stand in its own right, while the feature asserts itself as a fuller picture.

The film begins with a caravan of tourists—nay, an army of them—as a guide leads an expedition of military-like buses up the hills. These nifty rides stand high off the ground to protect the passengers. They all whip out their cameras and snap photos of the bears that cross the snowy terrain. Not too far away, the die-hards set up their tripods and zoom lenses. These are the pros in search of that one perfect shot.

Speaking of perfect shots, it’s hard to improve upon that doozy of a tracking shot in the first iteration of Nuisance Bear. However, the feature furthers the act of the filmmakers looking at the bears as they look back at them. There are extraordinary close-up shots of the bears, who look even more beautiful than before thanks to the beefed up production values. Even more effective is a new long take, one that pauses and lingers instead of moving with the bear as it strides through town.

The shot comes partway through Nuisance Bear after the massive effort to relocate the pesky garbage forager sees the animal airlifted to Arviat, Nunavut. The bear, heavily sedated and marked with a wash of green dye, recovers on the ground. As he’s drugged out and lethargic, the camera sits intimately close to his snout as he awakens from his woozy drug-induced slumber. The lens gazes into the bears eyes, which appear engulfed with sadness. The film remarkably invites audiences to see the bear at eye-level and consider how it feels to have one’s life uprooted, one’s home taken away, and one’s way of life overturned by forces outside of one’s control. The bears may bother residents down south, but he’s just trying to survive.

In a bold stroke, the filmmakers parallel the plight of the bears with those of the Inuit whose lives have similarly been affected by unwanted change. Nuisance Bear features a narrator, Mike Tunalaaq Gibbons, who observes fates shared between the animals and his people. Gibbons, a resident of the hamlet of Arviat, speaks with eloquently measured cadence as he imparts the story of the avinnaarjuk, or “nuisance bear.” He observes that these bears experience a loss of fear outside their natural habitat, which complicates their travels. Sounds no longer scare them, partly because they’re losing their hearing, while they become acclimatized to humans’ presence, learn to live with them, and glean how to simplify or adapt their hunting habits to the low hanging fruit (re: garbage) left by humans.

But Nuisance Bear dexterously intertwines social and historical factors shaping the way of life for animals and humans up north. Gibbons’ narration introduces the history of residential schools in Canada quite seamlessly and explores the violence wrought against his culture and language. This includes traditional hunting methods that might force Inuit to adopt western strategies, from using guns instead of harpoons to buying imported food at grocery stores instead of living off the land.

Gibbons’ story notes the tragic consequences that he’s personally experienced thanks to the arrival of outsiders who changed his way of life and, in turn, that of his children and grandchildren, but it inspires him to find more respect for the bear that wanders in around the community. As the film observes various residents of Arviat embark on a polar bear hunt of their own and their path intersects with the air-lifted bear’s lonely trek across the frozen land, the film finds a poignant kinship between the northern residents and the animals with whom they share they Earth.

The cinematography by film’s mighty team lovingly captures all living things against the harsh backdrop of the Arctic. Osio Vanden and Warden, shooting with Michael Code, Sam Holling, Ian Kerr, and Jack Gawthrop, deliver a tapestry of awesome images that editor Anders Landau beautifully connects in a kaleidoscopic fable of shared fates amid the climate crisis. Yet as the wonderfully wacky score by White Lotus composter Cristóbal Tapia de Veer accentuates the film’s offbeat rhythms with notes that evoke the animalistic behaviour of the tourists of the hit series, Nuisance Bear approaches its story with a distinct sense of humour. One sad offshoot of the climate crisis is the niche tourist industry that brings shutterbugs to Churchill.

Northern Manitoba might be an odd place for a future season of The White Lotus, but the story’s already there. This is a grand fable, masterfully told, about loneliness and connection in a faraway land that hits close to home.

Nuisance Bear premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.

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