There are very few places left in the world where you can experience wild animals in their true, uninterrupted environments. We think of African safaris, trekking to see gorillas in Eastern Africa, exploring The Galápagos Islands, or viewing massive penguin colonies in Antarctica.
Right alongside those bucket-list destinations is polar bear watching in Churchill, Manitoba – the self-proclaimed “Polar Bear Capital of the World”.
But the feature documentary Nuisance Bear turns that entire tourism spectacle on its head. Expanding on their acclaimed 2021 short film, Canadian filmmakers Gabriela Osio Vanden and Jack Weisman track the polar bear population as it intersects with both high-rolling tourists and the Inuit community of Arviat. The film shows how these amazing, apex predators are increasingly encroaching on human habitat, coming dangerously close to town lines.
Through their lenses, we track a polar bear navigating a chaotic gauntlet of tourists, trucks, sirens, traps, wildlife officers, hunters, and forced relocation. The journey is given profound weight and depth through guidance and narration from the late Inuit elder Mike Tunalaaq Gibbons.
In 2018, Gibbons’ son, Aaron, was tragically killed by a polar bear while protecting his children. Though speaking about the predators became deeply difficult for the elder, his reflections in the film offer a moving reminder that the fault does not lie with the bear, but with a fractured ecosystem.
At this stage in time, watching this documentary is probably the closest I’ll ever personally come to seeing polar bears in the wild – and honestly, I’m okay with that.
Tour operators in Churchill use custom-built, massively oversized vehicles known globally as Tundra Buggies or Arctic Crawlers. Built with massive, five-foot-tall rubber tires to safely traverse the fragile subarctic terrain when the bears gather along the coast of Hudson Bay every October and November, these vehicles are the only way to see them. It’s not an intimate operation, it’s a heavily managed interaction.
As the VIFF program guide beautifully summarizes:
Winner of the highly coveted Sundance Grand Jury Prize for Documentary, this is a formally daring work about spectacle, survival, and the violence hidden inside the word ‘nuisance’.
We’re left contemplating what happens when the mascot becomes a problem?”
The festival has now come to a close, but you can check out the VIFF movie lineup all year long here:
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