Join an advance film screening the Climate Film Festival official selection documentary Nuisance Bear – an exploration of the complex relationship between polar bears and humans in Churchill, Manitoba.
For thousands of years, polar bears have migrated along the shores of Hudson Bay in northern Canada. 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. Returning to Churchill, Manitoba—the self-styled “Polar Bear Capital of the World”—filmmakers 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.
This in-person event at the Explorers Club Headquarters will include an post-screening panel discussion.
RESERVATIONS
This will be an in-person screening at Explorers Club Headquarters.
In-person tickets are $20 for Members, and $35 for the General Public.
Check-in will begin at 6:00 pm, with a beer and wine reception from 6:00 – 7:00 pm
Martin Nweeia
Martin T. Nweeia is the world’s leading expert on the narwhal tusk, led 18 High Arctic expeditions and is content curator for the Smithsonian Institution exhibit and award-winning book, “Narwhal: Revealing an Arctic Legend.” Dr. Nweeia was awarded Smithsonian fellowships in Vertebrate Zoology and Anthropology, and served 21 years as a Smithsonian Research Associate. His research and academic positions include those at Harvard, Case Western Reserve University, Polar Institute at the Wilson Center, Canadian Museum of Nature, and as Research Scientist and Grant Reviewer for the National Science Foundation, National Geographic Explorer, and Vice President for Flags and Honors at the Explorers Club. Films documenting Dr. Nweeia’s work include, two from the BBC, one from French Discovery and seven from the National Geographic Society, including a CINE Golden Eagle Award. Martin’s publications include cover features in the journals Nature, Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Arctic, and The Anatomical Record, as well as a cover feature in The New York Times’ Science Times. Martin received four Fulbright-Hays Awards, and was selected by the American Embassy as the Ambassador for Science during the 150th Anniversary of Canada. His work was presented by NSF as a highlight to the US Congress as an example “for the future of science.” He has been an arm’s distance from a wild polar bear.
Pegi Vail
Dr. Pegi Vail is an anthropologist and filmmaker at New York University’s Center for Media, Culture & History teaching documentary production in the Program in Culture & Media. A former Fulbright scholar, she is an international lecturer, has taught on the NYU global campuses, and at Columbia University. As a curator, she has programmed and presented with the American Museum of Natural History, MoMA, and through organizations such as the Moth, the storytelling collective for which she was a founding member, curator, and storyteller for. Vail has served on juries for the International Documentary Association, National Geographic World Legacy Awards, and the World Travel Tourism Council. Her award-winning film, Gringo Trails explored the long-term effects of tourism on local and Indigenous communities. She is currently directing the personal documentary set in Ireland about the repatriation of skulls stolen under colonialism, They Measured Our Heads, and producing the Ford JustFilms grantee, Shadow of Nanook, that revisits the High Arctic where Martha Flahety’s Inuit family experienced a traumatic exile by the Canadian government during the cold war.
