Sundance Winning Documentary ‘Nuisance Bear’ Acquired by Mubi

Gabriela Osio Vanden and Jack Weisman’s Nuisance Bear, which world premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival and won the U.S. Documentary Grand Jury Prize, has been acquired by Mubi.

Shot over several years in the subzero Arctic conditions of Churchill, Manitoba, and Arviat, Nunavut in Canada, Nuisance Bear reflects a rigorous, deeply embedded filmmaking process.

The film marks the feature debut of Gabriela Osio Vanden and Jack Weisman, expanding on their acclaimed 2021 short of the same name, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and was shortlisted for the Academy Awards. The feature is an immersive, character-driven portrait of a polar bear navigating a world reshaped by human presence.

Gabriela Osio Vanden and Jack Weisman said, “A ‘nuisance bear’ is defined as a bear that has lost its fear of humans. The animals we label as unwanted often reveal a great deal about us. We were drawn to a bear no one wanted because its story felt deeply human. We began this film more than ten years ago, at a time when we were falling in love — with each other, and with the world of these bears. Our aim has always been to create bold, original nonfiction films, and we are thrilled to be partnering with Mubi, a company that champions cinema, to bring Nuisance Bear to audiences worldwide in theaters and beyond.”

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.

Returning to Churchill, Manitoba—the self-styled “Polar Bear Capital of the World”—filmmakers Gabriela Osio Vanden and Jack Weisman expand their award-winning short into a feature guided by an Inuit narrator whose perspective resists simplification. Shot with striking intimacy and scale, the film observes bears that are constantly monitored, photographed, and redirected. In tracing this uneasy coexistence, Nuisance Bear becomes a meditation on how humans manage, commodify, and redefine wildlife—overturning the conventions of the nature documentary and reframing animals not as spectacle, but as active agents in a rapidly changing world.

The film is a U.S.-Canadian production from A24, Documist and Rise Films, in association with The deNovo Initiative and Ninmah Foundation, produced by Michael Code, Will N. Miller and Teddy Leifer.