Nuisance Bear, a feature-length documentary directed by Jack Weisman and Gabriela Osio Vanden of Documist, has won the 2026 Werner Herzog Film Award, a prestigious prize conferred on one film each year by the director Werner Herzog. Homelands served as the film’s fiscal sponsor. The award ceremony will take place on December 18 in Munich.
The rest of this post is reproduced from the Herzog Foundation announcement.
The film centers on the annual polar bear incursions into towns of Churchill, Manitoba, and Arviat Nunavut, in the Canadian Arctic. Regarded as unwanted neighbors, the bears are driven away while also having to contend with hordes of tourists, hunters, and wildlife conservation officers. They ultimately seek refuge at the town’s landfill.
The story is interwoven with the personal tragedy of an Inuit Elder, who serves as the film’s narrator in his native language, Inuktitut. It is not only the bears who pay the price for the profoundly troubled relationship between civilization and wildlife. The film also draws a parallel to the heavy price paid by the Indigenous Inuit for a settlement that exists solely to serve commercial interests.
The film presents an entirely new perspective without ever becoming didactic: Are we not, in fact, the true nuisance—the real intruders? NUISANCE BEAR is a courageous film: refreshingly youthful and truly groundbreaking. Through its beauty, its sorrow, and its profound insight, it reaches far beyond anything one would ordinarily expect from a wildlife film.
NUISANCE BEAR is a feature-length documentary directed by Jack Weisman and Gabriela Osio Vanden. Depicting the complex relationship between polar bears and humans in Churchill, the film expands on their acclaimed short film of the same title (2022). It premiered in the U.S. Documentary Competition at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Grand Jury Prize for Documentary.