The documentary film Nuisance Bear will have its world premiere at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, on January 24. The film is a fiscally sponsored project of Homelands.
Directed by Gabriela Osio Vanden and Jack Weisman of Documist, Nuisance Bear looks at the relationship between polar bears, townspeople, tourists, wildlife officers, and First Nations people in northern Manitoba, Canada. The feature-length film grows out of an award-winning 2022 short for The New Yorker produced by the same team.
“When a sacred predator is branded a nuisance, it becomes unclear who truly belongs in this shared landscape,” the filmmakers write. Sundance calls the film “a striking portrait of the fraught coexistence between polar bears and humans, guided by an Inuit narrator whose insights resist simplification.”
Homelands sponsored Documist’s 2022 documentary feature The Territory, which also premiered at Sundance. The Territory won two awards at the festival, as well as an Emmy, a Peabody, and others. It was bought by National Geographic and is available for streaming on Disney+.
Visit the Sundance website to learn more about Nuisance Bear and the filmmakers.