Nuisance Bear
2022 · 14m · Canada
Directed by Jack Weisman, Gabriela Osio Vanden
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, humorous
In a small Canadian town, wildlife officers, tourists, and residents must contend with polar bears wandering into their midst.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Structured around bureaucratic nuisance-bear-management protocols in a Canadian town besieged by polar bears — New Yorker production, fourteen minutes, dryly comic premise. Yes, that's a film I'd actually watch.
Structuring around the bureaucratic protocols of nuisance-bear management is precisely the dryly observational Frederick Wiseman move applied to a polar-bear-and-tourists situation — and a New Yorker Documentary credit confirms the editorial discipline. Fourteen minutes, finely held.
13:52, 90.8K views, 636 likes, New Yorker-released doc by Weisman/Osio Vanden — the bureaucratic-protocol-as-structure conceit is exactly the kind of compressed observational form that turns a clash-of-species premise into something funnier and grimmer than expected. New Yorker has a real eye for these.