Nuisance Bear - Co-directors Gabriela Osio Vanden & Jack Weisman

Winner of the U.S. Documentary Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and hailed by Werner Herzog as “truly groundbreaking”, Nuisance Bear places viewers inside the world of a polar bear to deliver a cinematic pressure cooker and an urgent parable for our times. Filmmakers Gabriela Osio Vanden and Jack Weisman follow a polar bear in Churchill, Manitoba — the self-styled “Polar Bear Capital of the World” — forced to navigate tourists, wildlife officers and hunters as climate change pushes it into town. Guided by Inuit narrator Mike Tunalaaq Gibbons, whose perspective resists simplification, Nuisance Bear overturns the conventions of the nature documentary to ask: when a sacred predator is branded a “nuisance,” who truly belongs in this shared landscape? Co-directors Gabriela Osio Vanden and Jack Weisman join us in conversation about the making of Nuisance Bear. About the filmmaker - Gabriela Osio Vanden is an award-winning Venezuelan-Canadian Director and cinematographer based in Toronto. She brings a background in painting and dance to her images which have premiered at major festivals, including TIFF, Camerimage, SXSW, IDFA, Sheffield DocFest, and True/False. She is a HotDocs 2022 Fellow. Her student thesis film The Rambler was awarded an internship with Phedon Papamichael ASC GSC whom she shadowed on Alexander Payne’s Downsizing. Gabriela has a BFA in Film Production from York University. Her latest film Nuisance Bear premiered at TIFF and played at over 120 Film Festivals. It won multiple awards but most notably a Critics Choice Award and Outstanding Non-Fiction Short at Cinema Eye Honors. It was shortlisted for the 95th Academy Awards. About the filmmaker - Jack Weisman aspires to make visually striking and original films that defy easy classification. His works of creative non-fiction have premiered at many festivals including Sundance, SXSW, TIFF, and IDFA. Jack’s breakout short, Nuisance Bear (2022), co-directed with Gabriela Osio Vanden, offers a gripping, wordless study of polar bears navigating human-dominated landscapes in Churchill, Manitoba. The film received widespread acclaim, earning a spot on the 95th Academy Award Shortlist, two Emmy nominations, and top honors at Cinema Eye Honors, Critics’ Choice Documentary Awards, and IDA Documentary Awards. Jack’s debut feature will premiere in 2026 and is produced by A24, Documist, and Rise Films. Weisman is a co-founder of Documist, an Emmy and Peabody-winning production company based in NYC and Toronto. He served as an executive producer on The Territory (2022). The Territory premiered at Sundance, where it won the World Cinema Documentary Audience Award and a Special Jury Prize, and is now available on Disney+ through National Geographic Documentary Films.