The best short documentary of 2021 may have spawned the best feature documentary of 2026! Well, spawned isn’t the right word, as Nuisance Bear was always meant to be more than the 14-minute version released five years ago. Directors Jack Weisman and Gabriela Osio Vanden returned to Churchill, Manitoba, to continue their spotlight on the “Polar Bear Capital of the World” and expand their coverage to present more perspectives, including those from a second location, as we see the Inuit relationship to those same creatures causing a fuss down the Bay. The result is another enchanting and more spiritual consideration of wildlife in today’s world.
Unlike the short, this Nuisance Bear includes a score, but not one that steers your feelings. It also includes narration, but not the expositional kind. Spoken by the late Inuit elder Mike Tunalaaq Gibbons, this voiceover is especially personal and specific, yet also represents an Indigenous history that metaphorically relates to the polar bears in certain ways. The documentary also has room for the bears’ point of view within the central exploration of animals encroaching on the civilization that first encroached on their territory and participated in its negative transformation.
Without taking the anthropomorphizing route of so many nature documentaries, Nuisance Bear even manages, quite brilliantly, to give the audience one particular polar bear to care about. Between that and opening with a tourist gaze, Weisman and Osio Vanden really know how to grab the audience and then subvert their expectations. They tug at our heartstrings in a manner that ultimately yanks on our brains. You’ll want to watch it twice, at least once on a big screen, to really appreciate how much is going on with this film, and many more films before it.
This review was originally published as part of our coverage of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival on February 2, 2026.