Sundance Winner 'Nuisance Bear' Gets Winter Release from MUBI

MUBI has released the first trailer for Nuisance Bear, the documentary that won the US Grand Jury Prize for Documentary at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. The film by Gabriela Osio Vanden and Jack Weisman opens in Los Angeles on November 6 and reaches New York, Canada and the UK on December 4.

The feature expands the directors' 2021 short of the same name. That short followed a polar bear on its annual migration through Churchill, Manitoba, the self-styled "Polar Bear Capital of the World." The new feature length carries the same premise further: an ancient migration colliding with tourism, surveillance and control.

What does the film show?

The synopsis lays out the stakes. For thousands of years, polar bears have migrated along the shores of Hudson Bay in northern Canada. Climate change now delays the freeze and pushes bears closer to human settlements. When a sacred predator is branded a "nuisance," the film asks, it becomes unclear who truly belongs in this shared landscape.

Oliver Weir reviewed the film at Sundance for The Film Stage. "Through visual storytelling alone, they captured not only the behavior of the animal but also the increasingly politicized environment that bears have had to adapt to in modern times," he wrote.

Weir identified two forces at work in Churchill:

• A wildlife management program that rounds up Avinnaarjuk, or "nuisance bears," and holds them in a facility until transport north.
• A booming tourism industry, captured in a slow-motion tracking shot of a bear crossing a road while a dozen tourists scrambled for the perfect picture.

"This tension between profit and protection, between exploitation and conservation, is explored in much more depth in Vanden and Weisman's latest feature, thanks to yet more stunning compositions and some crucial historical context provided by Inuit narrator Mike Tunalaaq Gibbons," Weir wrote.

What do the filmmakers want?

The directors stated their aim plainly. "Ultimately, our aim is to collapse the distance between audience and subject," Gabriela Osio Vanden and Jack Weisman said. "By immersing viewers in the bear's perspective while exposing the human forces shaping every step of its path, we challenge them to see this landscape, both natural and political, as a shared and increasingly contested space."

They added: "Nuisance Bear invites us to reconsider who truly belongs here and what coexistence demands of all of us."

What does this change for audiences?

The MUBI release turns a festival prizewinner into a theatrical event this winter. Viewers who missed Sundance can now judge whether the feature earns the praise the short received. The November 6 Los Angeles date comes first, with the wider December 4 rollout following. The trailer is available now, and it signals the film's method: images first, argument underneath.