Polar bears are growing increasingly comfortable around people, and that’s a problem. One can see the tension between these natural hunters and those who hunt them — whether that happens with telephoto lenses or high-powered rifles — in Churchill, Manitoba, self-proclaimed “polar bear capital of the world,” where tourists flock when the magnificent animals migrate in order to catch a glimpse of the threatened (but still quite lethal) species.
In their Sundance-winning feature doc “Nuisance Bear,” filmmakers Gabriela Osio Vanden and Jack Weisman spend nearly as much time observing the observers as they do the ice-white creature described in their title — a mama polar bear who walks right up to human-populated buildings in its search for food — zooming out to contextualize the phenomenon. As Inuit narrator Mike Tunalaaq Gibbons lays out in minimal words, the situation is infinitely more complex than it looks, touching on everything from colonialism to climate change, wildlife management to race relations.
Sundance godfather Robert Redford would have been proud: The eco-minded, Indigenous-supportive film festival he built serves as the perfect platform for a project of this nature. What began as a 14-minute documentary short for The New Yorker Studios landed top honors from The New Yorker film critic Justin Chang and his two fellow jurors at this year’s indie fest.
It’s easy to see why the visually stunning, ideologically understated project might stand out: Shot in gorgeous widescreen (an unusual format for documentaries), the movie catalogs all the way people behave around what appears to be a single bear, first seen dozing with her two cubs. The helmers include several human-free montages, where the bear hunts and swims as it normally would, but mostly they show how its life has been impacted by homo sapiens, including a tense scene where the bear appears in a hunter’s sights (all of it accompanied by a mischievous, obviously “The White Lotus”-inspired score from Cristobal Tapia de Veer).
For all its richness, “Nuisance Bear” doesn’t necessarily enunciate its themes. Instead, the directors trust audiences to extrapolate from Gibbons’ ruminative voiceover, which builds to the line, “They don’t see the harm they are causing when they try to control the bears.” Vanden and Weisman do their best to show what Gibbons means, even as they withhold a key piece of information — that the narrator lost his son in a polar bear attack, which might not have happened if the white men south of Arviat weren’t driving the bears in their direction. (To make matters worse, the animals are adapting to be less fearful of people before they reach the Inuit community.)
Early on, the doc shows crowds flocking to Churchill to see the bears, much as they might go whale watching or hoping to spot lions on safari — except, in this case, civilization is just a stone’s throw away. Human faces, when they do appear, are observed mostly at a distance, in much the same way animals are shown in traditional nature docs. “Nuisance Bear” isn’t about them — at least, not directly. A tour guide warns that the bears’ hearing is so sensitive, the slightest sound can disturb them. But that’s contradicted later on, when we realize that the animals are adjusting to the noise of their human neighbors, becoming emboldened by proximity.
In Churchill, the trash sites have all been bear-proofed (enclosed so the animals can’t graze among the garbage), but not so in Arviat, where Inuit enforcers show up in their buggies to honk loudly and chase the bears away from open-air landfills. A generation ago, the bears didn’t spend nearly as much time waiting for ice to form. The film doesn’t call out climate change directly, but the implication is clear: Shifting environmental conditions are changing the bears’ behavior. “The longer they stay on land, the more dangerous they become,” Gibbons explains.
Down in Churchill, when bears start to be a “nuisance” — that is, poking around where they’re not welcome — any number of strategies have been put into practice, from scaring them off to locking them up. Yes, such a thing exists as “polar bear prison,” and the documentary shows this system in action: The animals are caught and contained, then tranquilized and air-lifted by helicopter far enough north that the bears are now somebody else’s problem. What will become of the avinnaarjuk, as Gibbons refers to the nuisance bear? She’s tagged and marked with bright green dye, making her easy to identify from a distance — whether by drone or down the barrel of Inuit’s rifle (in both cases, the film offers views earlier docs couldn’t).
The hunting policies are different for the disparate human populations: White Canadians are only allowed to kill a few bears each year, whereas the Inuit act according to tradition (the movie doesn’t mention the market for the rare pelts, though it does show Native women skinning and stretching at least one hide). Halfway through, the doc shifts focus to the Inuit community, complicating matters as it delves into issues such as forced assimilation through residential schools. Somewhat unexpectedly, the film evolves into being an essay on how the “outsiders” deal with nature and Natives, as the encroaching world endangers what The New Yorker would call “preëxisting” ways of life.
English (US) ·