ENCOUNTERS 2026: Nuisance Bear

Every year since our founding in 2010, The Bioscope has proudly hosted screenings of The Encounters South African International Documentary Festival. Now celebrating its 28th year as a festival, Encounters returns to The Bioscope once again with screenings at The Bioscope from 5 - 14 June. Tickets are R90. 

SEE THE FULL BIOSCOPE ENCOUNTERS PROGRAM HERE.

Nuisance Bear (A)
Dirs. Gabriela Osio Vanden & Jack Weisman | United States/Canada | 2026 | 89 min.

Shot in the remote town of Churchill, Manitoba—known as the polar-bear capital of the world—this carefully considered film follows an adolescent bear who has been separated from his mother too early and becomes a nuisance to the local human population.  As polar bears’ natural territory shrinks and the oceans warm, they are increasingly restricted to land rather than the ice they used to seasonally inhabit. In this changed world, humans and bears no longer have the luxury of mostly leaving each other alone, as they have done for millennia. In the words of its Inuit narrator, Mike Tunalaaq Gibbons, the bear is “a visitor from the past navigating a maze of the present”.  But it’s not just the bears who are impacted by this schism in time. So too are the local Inuit populations who have to face the dangers of ‘nuisance bears’, while Western scientists and ecologists focus on helping the bear populations to increase.