Nuisance Bear
A documentary about the painful coexistence of polar bears and humans. In one village, the bears draw tourists; in another, they trigger a hunting frenzy.
Polar bear populations are declining worldwide, but you wouldn’t know it in Churchill, Manitoba in Canada. There, the animals’ movements are causing unrest, drawing record-breaking crowds of tourists while also sparking competition for hunting permits.
Nuisance Bear is a new documentary about polar bears on the fringes of human settlements. It portrays the harrowing encounters and uneasy coexistence between two species that have long avoided one another, in two communities where residents are struggling to live alongside increasingly common large predators. In one place, the bears are a tourist attraction; in the other, a dangerous threat to be eliminated at any cost. In both communities, people both respect and fear the animals. Contrary to what one might expect, both approaches have their problems.
With an Inuit narrator guiding the film, Nuisance Bear asks who the northern hemisphere ultimately belongs to. The film captures polar bears venturing into villages as the ice melts, damaging property and scavenging for food in garbage dumps. The footage contains plenty of bear mischief, but also genuine and justified human fear. The threat of dangerous encounters – for both species – ultimately always lingers in the background. It cannot be dispelled by declarations of endangered status, nor can those declarations restore lost habitats.
Susanna Puomio
Screenings
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Kino TöölöSat 19.9. at 13.15–14.4287 min, 1/3
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Maxim 2Tue 22.9. at 16.30–17.5787 min, 2/3
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Kino Engel 1Sat 26.9. at 19.00–20.2787 min, 3/3