The Lake County Film Festival returns in 2026 for its Sweet 16 edition, celebrating sixteen years of independent cinema with a diverse, ambitious, and international slate of feature and short films. The festival runs March 12–23, 2026.

This year’s festival will screen films at three venues: the College of Lake County in Grayslake, Gorton Center in Lake Forest, and — for the first time — the Antioch Theater in Antioch, expanding the festival’s footprint and access across Lake County.

Gorton Center is proud to be one of the screening venues for “Nuisance Bear”!
From the Sundance Film Festival program:

A polar bear is forced to navigate a human world of tourists, wildlife officers, and hunters as its ancient migration collides with modern life. When a sacred predator is branded a nuisance, it becomes unclear who truly belongs in this shared landscape.

Filmmakers Gabriela Osio Vanden and Jack Weisman return to Churchill, Manitoba — affectionately known as the “Polar Bear Capital of the World” — to deepen the inquiry begun in their award-winning short film. The result is a striking portrait of the fraught coexistence between polar bears and humans, guided by an Inuit narrator whose insights resist simplification.

The film traces this relationship with nuance, revealing how these arctic creatures deal with being constantly monitored, photographed, and redirected. There is a thrill in watching a polar bear outwit human efforts to contain it, underscoring the bears’ resilience and the fragility of the systems that attempt to control them.

By challenging the conventions of a nature documentary and favoring confrontation over moralism, Nuisance Bear invites us to reconsider our assumptions about wildlife as spectacle.

Documentary • USA • 2026 • 90 Minutes
Directors: Gabriela Osio Vanden & Jack Weisman
Producers: Michael Code, Will N. Miller, Teddy Leifer
Executive Producers: Joe Karetak, Eric Anoee, Nicole Stott, Emily Osborne, Harry Go, Nicole Quintero Ochoa, Moudhy Al-Rashid, Sam Frohman, Alex Pritz
Cinematographers: Joel Herrera, Gabriela Osio Vanden, Jack Weisman, Michael Code, Sam Holling, Ian Kerr, Jack Gawthrop
Editor: Andres Landau
Composer: Cristóbal Tapia de Veer

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