EXCLUSIVE: Most filmmakers hope to come out of Sundance with a distribution deal or perhaps an award. The directors of feature documentary Nuisance Bear will leave town with a marriage license.
Jack Weisman popped the question to fellow filmmaker Gabriela Osio Vanden in the middle Main Street in Park City on Monday in front of the Egyptian Theatre, as surprised festival-goers looked on. Osio Vanden accepted and then the proceedings went on the fast track as Nuisance Bear executive producer Alex Pritz, an old friend of Weisman’s, informed the couple he was ordained to perform marriage ceremonies. By the power vested in him, Pritz conducted the rites inside the Egyptian.
Crowds on Main Street applaud the happy couple.
Courtesy of Basin + Range Photography
It was a chilly day for the ceremony, but probably not as cold as where Weisman and Osio Vanden shot Nuisance Bear – in Churchill, Manitoba, “affectionately known as the ‘Polar Bear Capital of the World.’” The town has become a popular destination for people who want to gawk at the extraordinary creatures.
Nuisance Bear, which grew out of a short Weisman and Osio Vanden directed, is premiering in U.S. Documentary Competition. Watch an exclusive clip from the film below.
‘Nuisance Bear’
Sundance Institute
“For thousands of years, polar bears have migrated along the shores of Hudson Bay in northern Canada,” notes a synopsis. “Today, that ancient rhythm collides with a human world of tourism, surveillance, and control. Nuisance Bear immerses viewers in the experience of a polar 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.”
The synopsis continues, “Gabriela Osio Vanden and Jack Weisman expand their award-winning short into a feature guided by an Inuit narrator whose perspective resists simplification. Shot with striking intimacy and scale, 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.”
Deadline interviewed the filmmakers three years ago when the Nuisance Bear short film was vying for Oscar recognition.
“There’s a lot of films that get made in Churchill,” Weisman noted back then. “We realized that there was this missing component in the stories that were being captured there… It became obvious through watching those and watching the filmmakers, that there was an opportunity to do something just completely different from the traditional approach.”
Osio Vanden and Weisman’s depiction of the bears contrasts with usual accounts profferred by news outlets. “There’s a dramatization of polar bears in the media as being monsters,” Weisman observed. “I think there’s been a sort of exaggeration because it’s a grabby story about maulings. There was one mauling in the last like decade… Obviously, it was really traumatic and tragic. No one was killed, except for the bear.”
The feature length version of Nuisance Bear is produced by Michael Code, Will N. Miller, and Teddy Leifer. Along with E.P/wedding officiant Alex Pritz, the film’s executive producers include Joe Karetak, Eric Anoee, Nicole Stott, Emily Osborne, Harry Go, Nicole Quintero Ochoa, Moudhy Al-Rashid, and Sam Frohman.
Cinematography is by Osio Vanden and Weisman, Michael Code, Sam Holling, Ian Kerr, and Jack Gawthrop. Andres Landau edited the film. Emmy-winning composer Cristóbal Tapia de Veer (The White Lotus) wrote the film’s score.
Watch a clip from Nuisance Bear below.