Winner of the US Grand Jury Prize for Documentary at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival 2026, Gabriela Osio Vanden and Jack Weisman’s visually stunning Nuisance Bear will now get a release this winter. Set for a Los Angeles bow on November 6 and NY, Canada, and UK release on December 4, MUBI has unveiled the first trailer.
Here’s the synopsis: “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.”
Oliver Weir said in our Sundance review, “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.”
Filmmakers Jack Weisman and Gabriela Osio Vanden said, “Ultimately, our aim is to collapse the distance between audience and subject. By immersing viewers in the bear’s perspective while exposing the human forces shaping every step of its path, we challenge them to see this landscape, both natural and political, as a shared and increasingly contested space. Nuisance Bear invites us to reconsider who truly belongs here and what coexistence demands of all of us.”
See the trailer below.
The post Nuisance Bear Trailer: Sundance Grand Jury Prize Winner Arrives This Winter first appeared on The Film Stage.
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