“Nuisance Bear” is blessed with what is surely the cutest opening shot at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, but don’t be fooled: This is no cuddly nature documentary.
Directors Gabriela Osio Vanden and Jack Weisman use the image of a mama bear and her cubs to draw us in, and then they pull straight back to the animals’ unsettling reality. Though their ancestors have migrated along the shores of Canada’s Hudson Bay for thousands of years, this generation faces all new challenges. It’s no spoiler to note that most of them come in human form.
Churchill, Manitoba calls itself the “Polar Bear Capital of the World,” which means the animals have to coexist as both dangerous wildlife and commodified tourist attraction. It’s not an easy balance for anyone, as the title implies: What the locals call nuisance bears are really just animals that don’t have the skills to survive in what has become, for them, an unnatural world.
Traps, helicopters and tundra buggies all work to draw the bears near enough to delight tourists, and then corral them when their forced proximity becomes a risk. The ensuing encroachment has also impacted the Inuit communities around Churchill, who have had to adjust their own, longstanding relationship with the animals.
For their feature debut, Weisman and Vanden have expanded their award-winning 2021 short of the same name, while keeping a similarly loose style. Turning a short into a full-length film, however, requires not just a desire to say more, but much more to say. We could feel the taut intention beneath the quiet observation of the 14-minute short — but with so much time to fill in the longer version, passion ultimately wins out over precision.
An Inuit elder named Mike Tunalaaq Gibbons offers intermittent narration, and his insights serve as a slim structural post. Additional details of his family’s story — which includes a late and moving reveal — would bring further depth. The lack of narrative structure also results in an overreliance on the haunting score from Emmy winning composer Cristóbal Tapia de Veer (“The White Lotus”).
Nevertheless, while the original short was built on one stunning image after another, the feature has many striking moments of its own. Once again, they tend to coalesce around the meeting of mammals: one tagged and untamed, the other clutching a camera or a rifle. Weisman and Vanden also serve as DPs, overseeing a large cinematography team, and the visuals are consistently breathtaking.
Their connection to the material is always palpable and undeniably affecting. Very few viewers are likely to come away from this story believing that the nuisance is the bear.