There is a moment in Nuisance Bear where a polar bear crosses a road outside Churchill, Manitoba, and a tourist with a long lens turns his back on the animal to reposition himself for a prettier backdrop. That single gesture — the bear treated as scenery, the human as the real subject — is the whole film in miniature.
That pursuit began as a fourteen-minute short. Released in 2021, the original Nuisance Bear had no dialogue at all. It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it earned an honorable mention from the jury for Best Canadian Short Film, and it went on to be named to the Oscar shortlist for Best Documentary Short. The New Yorker distributed it, which is how many people first encountered the image of a tranquilized bear being airlifted out of a town in broad daylight.
On October 16, 2026, London audiences can see where that story went next. The feature-length Nuisance Bear screens at Imagine Cinemas 5, inside Citi Plaza at 355 Wellington Street, as part of the Forest City Film Festival. The film premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the U.S. Grand Jury Prize for Documentary, and it is now making the festival rounds rather than sitting on a streaming service. Admission is priced rather than free, with prices varying by ticket type.
The title comes from the bureaucratic label attached to bears that wander into Churchill — often drawn by the smell of food from the local dump — and have to be removed. Churchill sits on the western shore of Hudson Bay and is often called the "Polar Bear Capital of the World." Every year, polar bears migrate through the town, and every year tourists pour in to watch them, spending money that sustains the local economy. The bears that linger are the ones that become a problem. Weisman has said the pair noticed something missing from the many films made in Churchill: an opportunity to do something completely different from the traditional nature documentary approach.
The feature expands the short's premise in a direction that surprised even its makers. Where the short climaxes with the airlifted relocation of a bear, the feature follows that bear — actually a composite of animals shot over two years — to Arviat, Nunavut, a small Inuit community roughly 200 kilometres north of Churchill, which has its own population of stray bears. An Inuit narrator, Mike Tunalaaq Gibbons, who lived in Arviat, recounts how Inuit relate to polar bears, their cultural significance, and how sedentary life and climate change are creating challenges for bears and humans alike. Late in the narration, Gibbons reveals that his own son died in an attack by one of the animals. He has since passed away, making his voice in the film a kind of testament.
The result is a documentary that the Hollywood Reporter described as one of lingering beauty, sadness, insight and even unexpected humor, and that Variety confirmed as the winner of Sundance's U.S. documentary competition. The film runs 89 minutes. Its score is by Cristóbal Tapia de Veer, known for his work on The White Lotus. It was shot by a team of six cinematographers, including the directors themselves, and edited by Andres Landau. Mubi is handling distribution.
Much of the footage was captured with cameras mounted on cars — a technique the filmmakers developed because it let them move with the bears rather than chase them. "You feel safer, you feel like you're being more respectful to bears, you're able to move with them," Vanden explained during a post-premiere Q&A at Sundance's Library Center Theatre. Weisman added that filming wildlife remains a taxing process of capturing and hoping. The approach gives the film its bear's-eye-view immediacy, a quality the short had in its wordless form and the feature retains even as it adds narration and a score.
The choice to confine English-language input largely to overheard fragments from wildlife officers, conservation staff, guides and tourists keeps the film interpretive rather than informational. The closest thing to a talking head is the Inuit narrator, whose perspective reframes the entire premise. What begins as a story about a bear that becomes a nuisance turns into something about who gets to decide which lives are inconvenient, and what coexistence actually costs.
That the film lands in London at all is a product of the Forest City Film Festival's growth. Founded in 2016 by Dorothy Downs, the festival began as a collection of twenty-five films screened over three days in November to an audience of 1,200. It has since become a fixture of the city's October calendar, built around exhibiting work by filmmakers from Southwestern Ontario in juried competition while also screening Canadian and international films out of competition. The 2026 edition runs October 15 to 25.
Opening night this year belongs to Stunt Driver, starring Jay Baruchel, who is expected to attend alongside London-born director Michael Dowse, known for FUBAR and Goon, for an in-conversation event. The festival's principal venue has historically been the London Public Library's Wolf Performance Hall, though screenings also spread into the downtown core, including the Citi Plaza cinema where Nuisance Bear will play.
For anyone who saw the short — or who simply heard about the bear that got tranquilized and flown out of town — the feature is a chance to see how a fourteen-minute idea grew into something the filmmakers spent a decade making. Weisman and Vanden were shooting footage for the feature even while assembling the short, though they have said they had no clear map for how one would become the other. What they ended up with is a film that starts with polar bear cubs nestled against their sleeping mother and ends somewhere considerably more complicated.
The screening is scheduled for October 16, 2026 at Imagine Cinemas 5, 355 Wellington Street, inside Citi Plaza in downtown London. Tickets and the full festival lineup are available through the Forest City Film Festival.