In Nuisance Bear, filmmakers Gabriela Osio Vanden and Jack Weisman head to the “Polar Bear Capital of the World” - Churchill, Manitoba — where polar bears are being forced to navigate a human world of tourists, wildlife officers and hunters. One scared predator is branded a nuisance, raising the question as to who has a right to this shared landscape. The film shows the fraught coexistence between polar bears and humans, and is guided by an Inuit narrator.
Andres Landau edited an initial short on the subject, and recalls meeting the co-directors seven years ago at Victory Social Club, a creative studio in Toronto where he has an edit suite.
“We started talking about this project that had started a few years before that,” he shares. “They’ve been traveling to Churchill, Manitoba, and Arviat, Nunavut, in Northern Canada, filming the polar bears, the tourists that travel from around the world to see them, and the communities that live in those towns constantly interacting with the bear population. It sounded incredible and I really appreciate when I can be involved in a project as they are shooting or before it starts production, so I can have input and follow the process closely."
Along with producer Will Miller and Michael Code, the team decided to make a short film - a proof-of-concept, but without any dialogue or music - just sound design.
"It was a very powerful exercise," he recalls. "We’ve experimented with a few ideas, as we weren’t ready to expand it into the feature length yet. More stories and material needed to be captured."
This short provided the opportunity to screen it in numerous festivals around the world, where it was been recognized by industry peers, gaining several awards and an Academy shortlist nomination.
"That allowed us to attach A24 and Rise Films, and embark on this three-year journey creating the feature-length version, premiering at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival," he explains.
Landau edited the feature using Adobe Premiere Pro. 4K proxies were generated from all the material captured in the last ten years from more than 25 different cameras.
"We had a robust, organized project file that allowed me to navigate through the material and move pretty fast," he notes. "My setup is sort of basic, with a surface control panel for quick image scaling and color correction, as well as the audio mixer that allows me, in Premiere, to do a very good job pre-mixing all scenes and cuts I export for the team to watch on Frame.io."
Landau has a second system attached to the media server, allowing both directors to collaborate on different ideas and sequences while in the same room.
“The airlift is one of my favorite scenes of the film," he shares. "The short film’s last shot is the bear being airlifted, and not knowing what happens after that. In the feature version, we were able to follow his journey to where it's being dropped off. The way it was captured is unreal. It really impacted me after I watched the raw material. They followed the bear from a second helicopter being transported many kilometers away along the Hudson’s Bay shore."
At this point in the film, a meditative moment was implemented to give the viewer a reflective moment.
"I felt we needed an emotional connection, a down beat,” says Landau. “Putting your mind and body through a state of humanity, preparing the audience to go through the next few minutes of the film, which is in my opinion, one of the most powerful moments in recent documentary filmmaking history."