‘Nuisance Bear’ Directors on Their A24-Backed Sundance Winner

Canadian filmmakers Jack Weisman and Gabriela Osio Vanden knew they were onto something when their short film “Nuisance Bear,” an unconventional nature documentary centered on the annual polar bear migration in Manitoba, was picked up by the New Yorker Studios following its Toronto Film Festival premiere in 2021 and shortlisted for the Academy Awards. 

But while the 14-minute short was conceived as “proof of concept” for a feature-length documentary, neither filmmaker could predict the success to come, with A24’s now-shuttered doc division coming on board as producers and the “Nuisance Bear” feature winning the Grand Jury Prize for U.S. documentary at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

“It’s been like an open-eyed dream the whole time. I can’t believe it’s all happened,” Weisman told Variety. The film, which is still seeking U.S. distribution, has its international premiere at the Thessaloniki Intl. Documentary Festival, which runs March 5 – 15.

Filmed between Churchill, Manitoba — the self-proclaimed “polar bear capital of the world” — and the Arctic hamlet of Arviat, a predominantly Inuit community on the shores of Hudson Bay, “Nuisance Bear” follows the growing tensions that arise as polar bears are increasingly driven from their natural habitats. Opening with scenes of tourists flocking to witness the magnificent creatures during their annual migration, it also documents life among the Indigenous communities that live in a precarious co-existence alongside them. 

The film’s title comes from the Inuit word avinnaarjuk, which refers to the brazen bears that — so fully habituated to the humans encroaching on their native lands — make mischief as they roam about population centers. Musing on everything from colonialism and climate change to ecotourism and urban development, Weisman and Osio Vanden upend traditional notions of the nature documentary, even as they capture intimate, often arresting footage of polar bears in the wild.

“Nuisance Bear” is an A24 presentation, in association with Ninmah Foundation, the Denovo Initiative of a Documist and Rise Films production. Producers are Michael Code, Will N. Miller and Teddy Leifer. The film, which includes a score by “The White Lotus’” Cristóbal Tapia de Veer, is narrated by the late Mike Tunalaaq Gibbons, a venerated elder in the Inuit community in Arviat, who passed away just weeks before the film’s premiere.

Variety caught up with the two filmmakers — who also tied the knot in Park City — ahead of the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

“Nuisance Bear” has turned into a decade-long journey for you. How did it start?

Gabriela Osio Vanden: It was just a really interesting cross-section of different interests. In 2015, Jack and I went out [to Churchill] for the first time. It’s a destination spot for tourism. Not that we wanted to become wildlife photographers necessarily. We were interested in filmmaking more from an artistic sensibility, but we do love animals and nature, and we did grow up watching a lot of the BBC stuff.

We were starting out as filmmakers, and working in a documentary arena, you should think a lot about what it means to point your camera, and at what, and how. In Churchill, we started to ask questions. And then we met people who started to ask, “Have you heard about Arviat?” So over time, we slowly thought it was really interesting that there’s this whole other community—

Jack Weisman: That’s just over here. 

Osio Vanden: That’s super close, and it’s also worlds apart. And they have a very different feeling and approach to ecotourism. Also, a lot of the environmental films we saw just felt very didactic, like this is right, this is wrong. And we just weren’t interested in making something like that.

Weisman: And neither were our participants. The people that are in the film, they agreed to participate in what the movie is. They didn’t agree to be in something that was going to put words in their mouths or point fingers at other people. It’s a very sensitive subject. There’s a lot of politics involved, a lot of money involved. We were given a really unique access to this situation because we wanted to be as neutral as we could.

The short ends with a striking scene of a polar bear being airlifted out of Churchill, and the feature sort of picks up from there. Was that the plan from the start?

Osio Vanden: With the short, we were, in our minds, making this feature back then, but we didn’t have anyone backing us. We couldn’t even afford to film the short in Arviat. We didn’t have anything, so we just invested our own time and energy, and we had our own equipment to do this proof of concept. But we actually thought we were shooting for this eventual feature.

It was only once we made an assembly of that footage and showed it to a respected filmmaker, they were like, “This is a film!” We weren’t conscious of it at the time. We just got very lucky that the film worked, and then we premiered at TIFF, and then the New Yorker was interested, and then we had this kind of snowball effect.

We always had this idea of [shooting in] both communities—

Weisman: And the airlift would take the bear, and you would follow the bear from one perspective into another. It was like a great way to pitch [the feature].

Logistically, the feature must have been a tremendous challenge. Can you talk a bit about the practical experience of making this movie?

Weisman: It was complex, for sure. One of the themes in the film is about respect, and so for us, it was really important to minimize our impact on the environment and on the bears, especially. That meant filming from the greatest distance that you can with the longest lens that you can afford. Which in our case was a 50-1000mm lens, which is like a twenty-pound lens that requires this massive stabilizer. 

Using the designs of other wildlife filmmakers, we worked with partners to make a vehicle where you could film the bears safely from within the truck. We could never put ourselves in danger. We could never put a bear in danger. We could move with them, which gives these really dynamic shots. But we wouldn’t chase after them. We knew the routes that they would take. It took years of learning the patterns and these different locations and using thermal and infrared cameras to detect when they would come into areas and just let them approach when they would — which was really rare. 

How were the shoots organized?

Weisman: It’s a migration for eight weeks in the fall, in October and November, and so we would orient our years around that eight-week window. We were both in two different communities primarily doing shooting, so I was directing in Arviat and Gabi was in Churchill. We really had to be aligned on a lot of stuff, and sometimes we weren’t. We fought about it—

Osio Vanden: Over the phone. It was great, because it’s like, “You can’t do anything about it, because I’m here, and you’re over there.”

You collected hundreds of hours of footage across several years. How much is the film evolving during that period, either because you’re responding to events on the ground, or something clicks into place, an angle you hadn’t considered before?

Osio Vanden: We had an idea that the bears do similar things every year. But what we needed to do was actually investigate our specific human characters. We cast a broad net at first, at least within Churchill. There are so many things that we did film, and you figure a lot of that out in the edit. But it was different with Mike [Tunalaaq Gibbons]. 

Weisman: We were really searching for characters and following lots of leads. And I think in the back of our minds, Mike was always there. Because the tone in Arviat, when we first started researching this film, really shifted around Mike’s son’s death [from a polar bear attack]. We made the short in some ways because of his passing, because we didn’t feel like we were the right people to be telling the story, or it was just way too sensitive. We knew that we needed to make contact with the family out of respect to them, to let them know that we were going to be making this film and give them the opportunity to reject us. And I think we would have packed our bags [if they had].

The road to meeting Mike was long. We knew about him many years ago and thought that he would be such an incredible fit for the film, but didn’t have the opportunity to ask, and didn’t really know what we were doing either. And so we did a community screening where hundreds of people in Arviat came to watch the short and asked us questions about what the feature was. It was really unanimously supported.

But there was still some skepticism you had to overcome.

Weisman: Unfortunately, there’s a real tension between environmental groups and Inuit hunters, and so we had to very clearly designate ourselves not as being with Greenpeace or any advocacy organization, that we were not here to make the Inuit look bad. There’s resistance to filmmakers coming in and telling the story of bears dying from climate change, and this trope that Inuit are frustrated by, and rightfully so. The film was very much about listening to Arviat’s side of this story that has very frequently been told through Churchill’s lens. Once Mike and the community understood that, it was like an open embrace in a way that is one of the most amazing experiences to have.

You’ve talked about this film as not being a “traditional nature documentary.” What does that mean for you?

Osio Vanden: One of our producers, Michael Code, who is from both communities, is a fantastic Indigenous filmmaker. We were already interested in this idea of the gaze. But through our conversations with him, he brought up a really good point that a lot of these filmmakers, when they go out into the “wild,” they’re being led by people indigenous to those areas to find those animals. This whole concept of nature untouched by human beings is a colonial construct. Because governments needed that idea for Manifest Destiny, to say these areas aren’t inhabited by people. It’s just not true that animals exist in this vacuum of nature that doesn’t have any impact from human activity. That was just really important to us. 

I think also the big reason why this film isn’t your traditional nature film is that we didn’t have the same kind of oversight that you do when you have a big production company. We had an independent budget. We did not have the kind of budgets that this type of filmmaking usually has. A lot of our equipment was donated. It was super scrappy, and I think it doesn’t necessarily look like that, but it is such an independent film. And because of that, we were able to have this more nuanced viewpoint. I think we all have a responsibility, when we live in these places, to think about the history of where we are now, how did we get there. 

Weisman: Leaving all the complexities in. As humans, we tend to think that we are the center of the universe, and for me, I was curious what a bear-centered story feels like. I don’t think we ever really know what the bear’s thinking or feeling. That’s kind of the great mystery, and I don’t think we get it in the film. That might be unsatisfying to some viewers, but I see a lot there. It’s a canvas. I think if you give them the opportunity to speak in this way, then if you’re listening, you’ll hear.

The Thessaloniki Documentary Festival runs March 5 – 15.