With Nuisance Bear, filmmakers Gabriela Osio Vanden and Jack Weisman return to Churchill, Manitoba — affectionately known as the “Polar Bear Capital of the World” — to deepen the inquiry begun in their award-winning short film in 2021. The result is a striking portrait of the fraught coexistence between polar bears and humans, guided by an Inuit narrator whose insights resist simplification.
We are joined by the film’s editor, Andres Landau, who also edited the short and has been involved with the story for seven years. Parsing over 700 hours of nature and narration footage, Andres and his team craft a beautiful exploration of the consequences when modern life and natural landscapes collide.
We tried a lot of archival footage, but we realized right away, especially after listening to Mike [Tunalaaq Gibbons], for a long time, and him really opening it up to Jack and Gabriela and telling his story about the bear and the human, we all came to the same realization at the same time. We started exploring around that storyline, and everything made sense to craft it with that structure.
The film recently had its World Premiere at the Sundance Film Festival 2026, winning the Grand Jury Prize in the U.S. Documentary Competition.
Feature Image credit to Sundance Film Festival
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