A different kind of ICE comes to mind as you see the star of “Nuisance Bear” airlifted over some mountains in frigid town of Churchill in Manitoba after being sedated by a tranquilizer and dropped far from where it first reached shore. When co-directors Gabriela Osio Vanden and Jack Weisman first made a short of the same name a few years back, intrigued by a polar bear community increasingly land bound when climate change has made the natural habitat of the water less hospitable and considering what rights they had relative to the human population, it’s ironic now that the feature-length version can feel like it’s less about how different species cohabitate than how humans treat one another when there are examples all around of people being removed and displaced and they might as well be stranded in the arctic when abandoned so far from home.
An unexpected rumination on colonialism and immigration that may be more effective than most when it just hits differently, “Nuisance Bear” has the instant appeal of a nature film set in an urban landscape as the bear Osio Vanden and Weisman follows paws at roadside signs and inspects dumpsters as if it were a predator in the brush. A narrow escape from a trap set out for it – a large barrel with a piece of meat inside for bait – proves thrilling early on, but the scenes of the bear in its element are subverted by the filmmakers to flip the camera on those trying to contain its experience – from the tourists who innocently take its picture from the comfort of a shuttle bus, basically implicating themselves among these lookyloos, to the wildlife rangers dispatched to make sure it doesn’t pose a threat to locals. The vast landscapes in which only the bear and those connected to it remind of one of the last great films about migration — Gianfranco Rosi’s “Fire at Sea” in which a boy’s play around his barren homeland of Lampedusa made the packed boats of refugees turned away at the border risking life and limb look ridiculous — but in fact, the bear warrants some caution as there have been attacks in these parts, though it can be increasingly hard to say which party initiated them.
A sense of being in the wild is accentuated by the hoots and hollers of “White Lotus” composer Cristóbal Tapia de Veer’s florid score, but where Osio Vanden and Weisman really enter the woods is considering the history of the land that all the action is taking place on, enlisting an Inuk tribal elder Mike Tunalaaq Gibbons as a narrator to relate a past of his own people’s displacement and subsequent industrialization and development of the real estate that has put the entire region in potential peril. He may provide crucial context, but in a way, he comes to speak for the bear when describing how forced migration severs familial ties and makes reclaiming those connections nearly impossible as the bear can be seen wandering around without an obvious direction and the film moves towards a poignant conclusion where their fate is even more directly intertwined. Perhaps the need to see yourself to see yourself as a human in the bear’s struggle to reach safety is the kind of selfish thinking that has led to such a contentious relationship between species in the first place, but the thought of being equals pulls a situation that feels a world away for most unbearably close.
“Nusiance Bear” will screen again at the Sundance Film Festival on January 25th at 11 am and January 28th at 5:20 pm at the Megaplex Redstone, January 31st at noon at the Holiday Village Cinemas and February 1st at 11:30 am at the Broadway Centre Cinemas in Salt Lake City. It will be available to stream from January 29th through February 2nd via the Sundance virtual platform.