Nuisance BearSundance 2026: Watching on the go Botagoz Koilybayeva May 2026 Festival Reports Issue 117 After the COVID-19 pandemic led some major festivals to turn digital, Sundance has continued to unfold as a hybrid event: at once a physical festival and a virtual one for attendees tuning in from abroad. As a non-EU citizen residing in Europe, visiting US festivals is turning into a pipe dream, and the virtual option makes for a decent alternative. The lack of collective spectatorship and shared laughter, however, is the most apparent loss. The ceremonial and ritualistic aspect of cinema all but disappears. It’s like going to church, a mosque, or a temple: you can pray at home, but the experience feels profoundly different when you share silence with others. After all, cinema is an event. Attending a festival in person is a whole different ball game. The exhaustion of travelling and securing accommodation is part of the ritual. There is no better way to get to know the venues than by walking from one to another and calculating how many screenings one can realistically catch in a day. Understanding the geography of the place, its local politics and issues, is the fabric of one’s festival experience; those efforts may not end up in the coverage, but they contribute to its richness. Watching Kix (2024), a documentary about troubled Hungarian youths, at Budapest’s Verzió festival felt all the more meaningful upon walking the same streets the rowdy protagonist traversed on his skateboard. Sundance’s online iteration only lasted five days, a fraction of the physical festival’s 11-day run, and the titles were available for 24 hours. Being able to watch a decent number of them turned me into “an auto-exploiting labourer,” to borrow from South Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han’s The Burnout Society. Han goes on to say that as neoliberal subjects, “we are our own master and slave in one.” This is a perfect description of the freelance critic attending the festival online. Sundance became for me a site of round-the-clock labour. Whenever I attend festivals in person, a new routine naturally forms: I pause my other activities and fully lock myself into the new environment. With the virtual Sundance, I couldn’t log out of my quotidian duties. To make things even more challenging, the festival kicked off mere days after I moved to Paris. Deprived of the big screen I own at home, my gaze was confined to the much more modest size of my laptop screen. I watched films on the go, but mostly at the ENS library and my unhomely new flat. This temporal and spatial disorientation, however, did not diminish my enjoyment of the films. What is truly fantastic about the online format is the ability to pause and ponder. My notes were abundant and legible! No unsolicited comments from people eagerly wanting to spill out their thoughts as soon as the credits roll. Just me and my laptop – which sounds worse than it was. In the end, I have mixed feelings about my first fully virtual festival. Democratic and globally accessible as it was, I would hardly call the digital Sundance a festival, but rather a series of online screenings with a time-limited curatorial stamp. Below, I share my thoughts on a few titles I truly enjoyed – films I might not have encountered had it not been for Sundance’s virtual platform. Nuisance Bear Each fall, tourists flock to Churchill, a subarctic town in northern Manitoba, Canada, to witness polar bears in the wild during their annual migration. But the animals, notwithstanding the incessant clicking of shutters, are not celebrities so much as vermin, condescendingly pegged by locals as “nuisance” bears. The more they become familiar to humans, the greater the danger they pose to people and to themselves. The town of Churchill has set up a wildlife management program to keep them away, but for the Inuit, the “nuisance” bears are Avinnaarjuk: young animals separated way too early from their mothers who tend to exhibit unusual behaviour and stop fearing humans altogether. We learn this from Mike Tunalaaq Gibbons, an Inuit elder who provides sparse voice-over in Inuktitut all through Gabriela Osio Vanden and Jack Weisman’s Nuisance Bear. The A24-backed film, based on a 2021 short, nabbed the main award in the U.S. Documentary Competition. The filmmaking duo first visited Churchill as young film students during the 2015 photo season; curious about what might happen to the bears after the tourists are gone, they kept returning for the past ten years. Osio Vanden and Weisman single out one bear and follow him as he roams around Churchill’s industrial area, ravaging trash bins and getting into trouble. Captured, the Avinnaarjuk is taken to a polar bear holding facility from which he’ll be released when the ocean freezes over. “The longer they stay on land, the more dangerous they become,” warns Tunalaaq Gibbons. Releasing a bear is a complex affair that requires helicopters and tranquilizers. In a scene that finds the bear behind bars, the filmmakers create a noir-like atmosphere punctuated by David Rose’s immersive sound design and Cristóbal Tapia de Veer’s distinctive music, which incorporates the mammal’s heavy breathing into suspenseful compositions. Once released and distinctly marked with green paint, the bear continues his journey North to Arviat, Nunavut, where he faces the Inuit’s annual bear hunt. It is devastating to see such majestic animals so vulnerable – to the changing climate that forces them to stay longer in towns; to invasive, ignorant tourists drawn to the natural spectacle; and to Canadian authorities who scare them away with loud fireworks, car horns, and helicopters. Bears have sensitive ears, and in this overwhelmingly hostile soundscape, they lose their hearing. Osio Vanden and Weisman’s portrayal of the intensive encroachment on the bears’ natural habitat works against more conventional and deeply problematic representation of animal life on screen. In trading a blue-chip, BBC-like aesthetic with an expert and detached voice-over, the filmmakers opt for a minimalist but incredibly effective approach, rendering the bear’s life through the voice of the Inuit elder who, in the spirit of the Inuktitut oral tradition, recounts the story of the Avinnaarjuk that killed his son. Shame and Money Life for humans is no easier, per Kosovar director Visar Morina’s third feature, Shame and Money, winner of the World Cinema Dramatic Competition award. Morina is no stranger to Sundance, having screened his sophomore film, Exile, in Park City in 2020. Like that predecessor, Shame and Money furthers Morina’s ongoing concern for work. At its centre is a middle-aged couple, Shaban (Astrit Kabashi) and Hatixhe (Flonja Kodheli), who, after working their whole life on a farm in Kosovo’s rural interior, suddenly find themselves in Pristina, a capital city too cruel to the former farm folk. Moving there with Shaban’s elderly mother and their three daughters, the couple struggles to make ends meet. Hatixhe’s younger sister Lina (Fiona Gllavica) helps the family find a flat and arranges work for Shaban at her husband’s club. Yet at their first reunion, it becomes clear that Lina is a bird in a golden cage, tightly controlled by her husband, who attempts to extend his grip over the newly arrived relatives. Morina’s economic style and his exposure of the travails of the gig economy recall Ken Loach’s Sorry We Missed You (2019). And there is a Loachian (or even Dardenne-like) energy in the way Janis Mazuch’s camera progressively closes in on the characters as they navigate a hostile milieu. As befits the film’s social realist ethos, the precarious subjects are placed front and centre, and we, the audience, bear witness to their trials and tribulations, pride and prejudice. No reference to Jane Austen here, but pride is indeed the cornerstone of the film. In one telling scene, Shaban and Hatixhe realize that they don’t have enough money for the deposit on the flat. The matriarch, Shaban’s mother, offers them a golden lira she had hidden during the Kosovo War, the only vestige of their former lives. The coin, which Shaban will later pathetically attempt to retrieve, becomes a spectral symbol of the pride and agency that’s been slipping away from them in the aftermath of the conflict – never explicitly mentioned in the film, yet deeply felt. In social realist films, character psychology is always at the forefront. Rather than foregrounding past trauma, deviations, desires, or other Lacanian syndromes, characters exist firmly in the here and now, and every decision feels prophetic. Morina succeeds in creating an honest and captivating story of “a nice guy” – as everyone keeps calling Shaban – who, in Kabashi’s committed portrayal, emerges not merely as kind, but as desperate and resilient – a man who bounces back because there is no other choice. Filipiñana Another captivating debut expanded from a 2020 Berlinale Silver Bear-winning short, hails from the Philippines. Rafael Manuel’s Filipiñana (winner of a Special Jury Award for Creative Vision in the World Cinema Dramatic competition) is an arresting fusion of beautifully choreographed images couched as a disturbing “eat the rich” parable. Over the course of a scorchingly hot day, we follow 17-year-old Isabel (Jorrybell Agoto), a “tee girl” arranging golf balls at the Manila Golf Course Depot, a microcosm of the Philippines’ unequal society. Filipiñana, executive produced by Jia Zhangke, fits into a recent trend of class-conscious works – from Parasite (2019) to No Other Choice (2025) – like an exotic fruit, reminiscent of the mango that Isabel slowly savours in between shifts at the driving range. Manuel creates a tapestry of various emotional intensities that emanate an eerie feeling – as if that delicious mango was full of worms. The sweltering summer heat informs the film’s languid pace. Perfectly manicured, the golf course is verdant and gorgeous, with generously watered lawns – quite literally a nature morte. Yet this abundance is reserved for a privileged few, mostly tourists from the United States and China. In one of the golf course’s many rituals, we see a group of young Filipina girls – clad in light blue dresses – unenthusiastically memorizing greetings in Chinese as they wash golf balls. Presiding over the paradise is the enigmatic guru-like owner Dr. Palanca (Teroy Guzman), like Isabel, a member of the Ilocano minority who left the country’s northern islands to move to Manila in his youth. The shared cultural background might explain why she’s so drawn to him. To capture their first encounter at the driving range, cinematographer Xenia Patricia frames Isabel at the centre of the shot: sitting before Palanca and carefully positioning his golf balls on the mat, her face appears at eye level with his crotch, as if trapped between his legs, and just a few inches away from his golf club. Palanca is clearly in a position of power. A beat later, when Isabel talks to a fellow tee-girl, the two are framed standing and facing each other on equal footing. Manuel’s visual grammar is deliberate and precise, conveying power imbalances through the geometry of his compositions. He also borrows elements from musicals. The film is peppered with sequences of servants and workers cleaning the premises in unison, swinging mops and sweeping floors in choreographed motions synchronized to what sounds like traditional Filipino folk music. I couldn’t shake the feeling that in its total dehumanisation of both rich and poor – and the sterile beauty of its manicured nature – Filipiñana offers little empathy to either camp. If sympathy emerges at all, it is perhaps directed toward nature itself, particularly in one striking shot of a tall, wilting tree being uprooted and hauled away from the golf course on a truck – an image vividly reminiscent of another tree ferried on a barge in Salomé Jashi’s documentary Taming the Garden (2021). In this manufactured paradise, only green trees are allowed to stay. Bedford Park Obsessions and lingering traumas also anchor Stephanie Ahn’s feature debut, Bedford Park, which took home a Special Jury Award for Debut Feature in the US Dramatic sidebar. Written, directed, and co-edited by Ahn, the film follows two Korean-American children of broken homes. Thirtysomething Audrey (Moon Choi) wants to have a child but seems unable to. By day, she works as a physiotherapist in New York City; by night, she seeks BDSM encounters with strangers she meets online. Her relationship with her parents is predictably fraught, and loneliness is creeping in. But once her mother suffers a car accident, and Audrey returns to the childhood home in New Jersey to look after her, the past, particularly the abuse she suffered at her father’s hands, comes back to haunt her. Likewise, Eli (Son Sukku), a former wrestler in his 40s, seeks to escape his family ties. Having left his partner and daughter, he now survives on odd jobs and lives in a derelict makeshift house. He, too, is lonely and lost. It is Eli whom Audrey’s mum crashes into, and the accident brings two broken people together. Bedford Park is suffused with a kind of melancholy reminiscent of Celine Song’s Sundance hit Past Lives (2023), similarly attuned to the ways Asian and Asian American people express love and devotion. In Ahn’s film, both protagonists are shaped by intergenerational trauma. Audrey’s father sacrificed his white-collar career in Korea to become a vendor in America – a humiliation he drunkenly reminds her of (“I come to America and I am dogshit!”). Eli, adopted by white Americans, endured bullying from his stepbrother and his mother’s neglect. At a gentle, unhurried pace, Ahn resists rushing the narrative into a conventional love story. The characters, carrying their own baggage, are cautious about revealing it to one another. Cinematographer David McFarland’s warm, earthy palette makes for a curious juxtaposition to a story that feels significantly darker, marked by halting conversations, silences, and unanswered gestures. At times, the film risks drowning in its unrelenting outbursts of trauma and summertime sadness. Yet there is something earnest in Choi and Sukku’s performances that punctures the heaviness, like Eli’s awkward attempt at levity – “I know how to use chopsticks,” he says when they order noodles. While Past Lives gestures at the Korean idea of inyeon, a bond that ties lovers to each other across reincarnated lives, Bedford Park also turns to Korean mythology and evokes han, an “ancient heartache” passed down through generations. With filmmakers like Song, Lee Isaac Chung (Minari, 2020), and now Ahn, it is refreshing to see the distinct Korean-American stories rendered with such emotional specificity and restraint. Sundance Film Festival 22 January – 1 February 2026 https://festival.sundance.org/
