William W. Warner Voice of Nature Award

For thousands of years, polar bears have migrated along the shores of Hudson Bay in northern Canada. Today, that ancient rhythm collides with the modern human world. Nuisance Bear immerses viewers in the experience of a bear forced to navigate tourists, wildlife officers, and hunters as climate change delays the freeze and pushes bears closer to human settlements. When a sacred predator is branded a “nuisance,” it becomes unclear who truly belongs in this shared landscape.

Directors Gabriela Osio Vanden and Jack Weisman expand their award-winning short into a feature guided by an Inuit narrator whose perspective resists simplification. The film observes bears that are constantly monitored, photographed, and redirected. In tracing this uneasy coexistence, Nuisance Bear becomes a meditation on how humans manage, commodify, and redefine wildlife—overturning the conventions of the nature documentary and reframing animals not as spectacle, but as active agents in a rapidly changing world.