Award-Winning Polar Bear Documentary Film ‘Nuisance Bear’ Trailer​

“Who is the real nuisance?” Indeed the important question. Mubi has revealed the trailer for a documentary film titled Nuisance Bear, originally an A24 release that they’ve sold to Mubi instead. This premiered at the 2026 Sundance FIlm Festival earlier this year where it won the Grand Jury top doc prize. A young polar bear is confronted with the presence of humans during its seasonal migration, as the boundaries between human & animal habitats continue to blur due to worsening climate change. “For generations, we lived in a world where we kept our distance from each other. That world no longer exists.” Filmed entirely in northern Canada, Churchill (see Google Maps) calls itself the “polar bear capital of the world.” During the autumn, hundreds of bears migrate north, passing through. Based around the story of an old Inuit sage marked by personal tragedy, Nuisance Bear adopts the viewpoint of these “undesirable” neighbors whose path brings them into conflict with modern life. I’ve seen this doc and it’s good but really tragic and sad because these poor bears are just treated as either zoo animals (even in the wild) or game to be hunted. Leave them alone!

Here’s the official trailer (+ poster) for Vanden & Weisman’s doc Nuisance Bear, from Mubi’s YouTube:

🇨🇦 Churchill, Manitoba in Canada sells itself as the “Polar Bear Capital of the World,” but what happens when the mascot becomes a problem? In their debut feature based on their short, Canadian filmmakers Gabriela Osio Vanden and Jack Weisman track a polar bear through encounters with tourists, trucks, sirens, traps, wildlife officers, hunters, and relocation. The town profits from ursine spectacle, but Vanden and Weisman portray bears as neither scenery nor symbol. Instead, the bear becomes our protagonist, trapped in a system built to watch, sell, manage, and remove it. Nuisance Bear is directed by filmmakers Gabriela Osio Vanden & Jack Weisman, both making their feature directorial debut after creating the original Nuisance Bear short film in 2021. Produced by Michael Code, Teddy Leifer, Will N. Miller, Gabriela Osio Vanden & Jack Weisman. This initially premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival earlier this year. Mubi debuts the Nuisance Bear doc in select US theaters starting on November 6th, 2026 soon this fall.

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