“Bear of Harassment”: Tourists and polar bears get close in Oscar-nominated film

Polar bears are a welcome and unwelcome sight in the town of Churchill, Manitoba.

They are welcome because each year the ursine creatures draw tourists to the area eager to see the bears passing through Churchill to the winter feeding grounds in Hudson Bay. And the tourists pour a lot of money into the local economy.

On the other hand, the bears cause problems – problems that last too long anyway, attracted by the smell of food from the local dump. It is the last species to feature in the Oscar-nominated documentary Nice bear. The short film, directed by Jack Weisman and Gabriela Osio Vanden, will stream on NewYorker.com and The New Yorker’s YouTube channel.

“A lot of movies are shot in Churchill,” notes Weisman. “We knew there was a piece missing from the stories being captured there… As we watched it and watched the filmmakers, it became clear that there was an opportunity to do something completely different from the traditional approach. “

Nice bear begins with slow-motion shots of waves crashing against an icy shore, then transitions to a slow-mo tracking shot across a snowy landscape. A magnificent polar bear comes into view, walking in slow motion, occasionally lifting its nose to inhale a whiff of icy air. At this point, the film may seem like a typical nature documentary. But as the bear moves on, it reaches a street where a group of tourists and several photographers see it walking calmly to the other side. A man with a long lens has his back to the polar bear and appears to be moving for a shot with a more scenic backdrop than traffic lanes.

“The moment the bear crossed the road, it really hit us when we caught it,” Weisman tells Deadline. “I think that moment speaks to the heart of the film because for this photographer the bear is not valuable if it is in the middle of the street with the cars and the buildings and the telephone poles in the background. If it comes to the other side and is in the brush, then it is valuable. And so our film more or less consists of all those moments that people don’t think are valuable.

There is another important way Nice bear differs from the usual cinematic approach to natural history: it contains no voiceovers or words, no interviews, no music. It is a purely visual and auditory experience.

“Jack and I are both cinematographers by profession, so it felt like a natural progression that our first directorial film would be more visually focused,” explains Osio Vanden. “We are both documentarians, but I also work on stories and commercials. And you think a lot about how to represent things visually. It just felt like a challenge to ourselves.”

It’s not that the filmmakers weren’t tempted at various times to include expected elements.

“At one point we wanted to add music and our sound designer said, ‘No, please don’t add music, you don’t need it,'” says Weisman. “It wasn’t completely intentional at first, but it was just shaped by these different creative imperatives.”

Striking images support the 13-minute short, which centers primarily on a star wearing an ivory coat, weighing hundreds of pounds and walking on padded legs the size of large frying pans. The bear, particularly interested in the city’s garbage dump, encounters metal barriers that prevent him from grabbing a quick meal (raccoons slip through the barriers more easily). But the film also shows how people – or at least their vehicles – are used to drive the bear away from the landfill and other human settlements.

The bears migrate in the late fall and early winter, and there are a number of children trick-or-treating in the freezing night temperatures for Halloween. A child slips and falls, and one can’t help but fear that a polar bear might jump out from the shadows on it.

“The media dramatizes that polar bears are monsters,” notes Weisman. “As people who don’t live in this town, we shouldn’t talk about whether it’s dangerous to live with bears – of course it is. But I think that’s a bit of an exaggeration because it’s a touching story of tearing apart.” In the last ten years, people have been torn apart… It was, of course, really traumatic and tragic. No one is dead except the bear.

The film is actually about a space that humans and polar bears share, at least for a limited time each year (from the bears’ perspective, humans are believed to be causing the nuisance as humans have chosen to establish a settlement along their migration route ). The documentary is not intended to address larger questions about whether climate change has reduced polar bear populations, either in Hudson Bay or elsewhere in Canada.

“We all know that when sea ice melts, they are vulnerable. [But] we are filmmakers, not scientists,” says Osio Vanden. “We wanted to do something that is experiential about what we see, and specifically about this interaction between wildlife and people.”

From the vegetation cracking in the frost to the bears breathing, the film’s soundscape had to be recreated from scratch.

“We couldn’t really capture sound with our camera because the camera was mounted in the front of the car and the sound of the engine would have drowned out any microphone,” notes Weisman. “And a lot of the slow motion messes with the sound too… We came back with this footage and had no audio. Five or six years ago I copied a library of sound effects from our university and made something like this [temp] Sound design – enough to make people feel that they can understand what is happening in the place.

Weisman adds, “Then I sent it to a remarkable director in Canada and she said, ‘This is a movie.’ And I was like ‘How, really?’ She said, “Yes, but you need a good sound designer and color.” And I said, “We don’t have money.” The filmmaker recommended her sound designer, David Rose, who took on the project, “basically anything we could afford, which wasn’t much because he loved creative freedom and input so much. Without Dave, this film wouldn’t have happened didn’t come.”

Executive Producers of Nice bear Among them is Alex Pritz, director of the Oscar-nominated documentary the territoryand Sigrid Dyekjær, producer of the territory. Weisman and Osio Vanden say they did not necessarily expect to be on the shortlist themselves.

“The campaign process is one thing and you hope to be shortlisted,” admits Osio Vanden. “But that was not to be expected. It was just a really good feeling.”

Weisman adds, “It’s very unpredictable. We were obviously hopeful, and we worked very hard to make the film as visible as possible… It’s been an incredible journey for us.”