True/False Film Festival: Nuisance Bear raises interesting ideas, but lacks a compelling argument

Courtesy A24

True/False is an annual festival in Columbia, Missouri, MO, that celebrates the best of nonfiction (and nonfiction-adjacent) filmmaking. Our film editor, Abby Olcese, is covering the event’s 23rd year, and all her dispatches can be found here. 

It may be easiest to sell you on Gabriela Osio Vanden and Jack Weisman’s buzzy documentary Nuisance Bear by calling it “Blackfish with fur.”

That’s a simplistic description (not to mention less than accurate, we’re dealing with wild land-dwelling mammals here, not captive orcas), but it does tell you what to expect. Vanden and Weisman’s film tackles the dangers of anthropomorphizing wild animals, and how climate change has complicated the relationship between man and beast by forcing them into closer proximity.

The bear of Nuisance Bear is a young polar bear whose traditional migration path in northern Canada is disrupted by melting ice. The bear’s journey north takes it from Churchill, Manitoba, where the largely white city leadership refuse to kill the endangered bears if they get too close to civilization and capitalize on tourism, to the Inuit village of Arviat, Nunavut, where the increasing population of migrating bears—and their protected status—are causing problems for the locals.

We’re introduced to the topic through narration from Mike Tunalaaq Gibbons, an Inuit elder who relates his people’s fraught history with the bears. The once-symbiotic relationship has devolved both through changing weather patterns and through centuries of white settlers’ devaluing of indigenous knowledge and attempts to eradicate it. The term “nuisance bear” itself is an English translation of an Inuit term for a young bear separated from its mother too early, and which makes unwise decisions as it learns to fend for itself.

The film’s narrative is divided between the (admittedly pretty endearing) bear, its encounters with the mostly-white law enforcement in Churchill, and the villagers in Arviat as they conduct a lottery for annual sanctioned bear hunting—a tradition and increasingly a survival necessity now overseen by the government due to the bears’ endangered status.

What emerges is a complex portrait of how we’re taught to think about nature, and what it’s like to actually live with it.

Nuisance Bear started as a short documentary, and the DNA of that film is readily apparent in the feature.

An originally tidy, perceptive framing gets a little stretched out in long form, losing some of the punch. It’s hard not to see the hordes of tourists snapping photos of bears in the wild and not think the documentarians are just like them, and the film never tries to dissuade viewers from that idea. But in circling these different perspectives without drawing a clear judgment, the movie loses some efficacy. Stretching out other perspectives beyond Gibbons’ story dilutes what is clearly the heart of the film.

Beyond that, Nuisance Bear doesn’t offer much in terms of a point. These are all intriguing topics of discussion, but where do they lead? At most, it’ll probably make you do a little more research before booking a wildlife tour, or make you more deeply question the next time you watch a nature documentary. And maybe that’s a good gateway. But other media exist that already do that, and with a sharper edge (see Blackfish, or read Mary Roach’s book Fuzz).

Nuisance Bear is admirable, but it feels like a surface-level survey course by comparison.