Sundance 2026: ‘Nuisance Bear’ – A Doc About Polar Bears in Canada
by Alex Billington
February 7, 2026
Is there a world in which humans and animals could co-exist peacefully? Maybe there is, maybe not… At this point in our history, it doesn’t seem possible. This film leans into the latter, unfortunately, in a sad story about the state of our world and the destruction we’re wreaking upon the planet and its many inhabitants. Nuisance Bear is one of many worthwhile documentaries premiering at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival and while it’s beautifully shot and easily watchable, there is something strange about the story its trying to tell. And ultimately the film ends up struggling to have anything interesting to say with nothing meaningful to add to the conversation about our planet & humanity’s inability to figure out how to exist without causing more chaos to the animal kingdom. If anything, it ends up being a bleak and depressing look at how animals like polar bears are suffering no matter where they go. There is no safe place for them, there is nowhere they can exist peacefully. While that is an interesting story to tell within a documentary, this film doesn’t have much more to add than just that. I wish there was something more to it but unfortunately that’s all there is.
Nuisance Bear is co-directed by filmmakers Gabriela Osio Vanden & Jack Weisman as their feature directorial debut. This doc is a full 90 min extended version of their short film of the same name. The first Nuisance Bear premiered in 2021 and won lots of awards and was featured by the New Yorker. The original short is the story of a polar bear that wanders into a city in northern Canada called Churchill and becomes a “nuisance”. This extended doc brings together all of these original ideas and explores it further, with extra footage and a storyline that connects to an Indigenous Canadian village even further north than the city. In the film, it opens in Churchill, known as the “Polar Bear Capital of the World”, with footage showing tourists arriving by the busload hoping to see and photograph these gigantic furry creatures in their natural habitat. But the narrative shifts when one of these bears starts spending too much time in the city looking for any food. They tranquilize it and send it further up north, where it decides to trek all the way to another human village. The doc film’s framing is based around a voiceover from an Indigenous man explaining his people’s natural relationship with the polar bears. But here’s where it gets weird – because he explains their tradition is to hunt & kill them, which is just as sad as what happens to them in the other city. I don’t like this either.
One of the most common problems with documentaries nowadays is that many of them don’t have enough good narrative content to really work as ~90 min feature films. This is exactly the issue with Nuisance Bear. It’s a good short film, but not a great feature. There isn’t enough for them to add. They keep re-using footage over & over. The focus on the Indigenous village and the people there seems peculiarly at odds with the rest of the narrative. The ultimate point of all of this is to show that yes, polar bears are stuck in the middle, they don’t have anywhere to go. Either they’re hunted by the Indigenous people in the north or hunted by the White men to the south. There’s no place for them anymore with humanity around, even though we should be learning to somehow peacefully co-exist with all of nature. The film does not really do enough to discuss this or have a conversation about conservation. Instead, it leans way too much into the human sides of these stories rather than the bears. Perhaps it’s controversial to say this, but I simply don’t believe the “tradition” of hunting polar bears should be allowed either. Canada should be doing more to protect them but this film isn’t about that & doesn’t offer any ideas that might encourage that. Instead, it’s just a sad cinematic portrait of how awful it is for animals out there while the humans have taken over so much of this beautiful planet.
Alex’s Sundance 2026 Rating: 6 out of 10
Follow Alex on Twitter – @firstshowing / Or Letterboxd – @firstshowing
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