The documentary film Nuisance Bear has won the Grand Jury Prize for U.S. Documentary at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. 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, residents, tourists, wildlife officers, and First Nations communities in northern Manitoba, Canada. The film had its world premiere at Sundance on January 24. The festival organizers described it as “a striking portrait of the fraught coexistence between polar bears and humans, guided by an Inuit narrator whose insights resist simplification.”
The Washington Post (subscription required) called Nuisance Bear “riveting” and “an edge-of-your-seat thriller.” After attending the premiere at Sundance, the Post’s reviewer, Jada Yuan, wrote that it “produced the kind of audience reactions usually reserved for midnight horror films, with the entire theater shouting commands to the screen or cheering in unison.”
The Wrap called it “visually breathtaking” while POV Magazine called it “a grand fable, masterfully told, about loneliness and connection in a faraway land that hits close to home.”
The feature-length film grows out of an award-winning 2022 short for The New Yorker produced by the same team. Homelands also sponsored Documist’s documentary The Territory, which premiered at Sundance in 2022. The Territory won two awards at the festival and went on to win an Emmy, a Peabody, and other prizes. 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.