Polar Bear Man
This will be a soothing and peaceful camping trip in the Torngat Mountains in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. Matthew Dale, a civil attorney from Lewiston, Maine, longs to enjoy the majestic nature and indulges his longstanding fascination with the majestic polar bear. Shortly after his dream expedition ended, one of the bears got too close and Dale returned home with a broken body.
In the earliest moments of Polar Bear Man, a revealing new documentary from VICE Reports, Dyer describes the horrific injury he suffered in the jaws of the gigantic beast. “I broke my jaw,” he recalls. “I had a collapsed lung. I broke a vertebra in my neck. From what I understand, [the bear] basically paralyzed one of my vocal cords. He was just trying to get me out of this tent with his mouth.”
Polar bear attacks on humans are not a new phenomenon, but they were relatively rare until the last decade. As this riveting film explores, one of the culprits behind this rise comes from a perhaps surprising source: climate change. A warming planet has wiped out much of the ice on which polar bears depend. As a result, these bears were forced to find food through other avenues, which led to an increase in incidents of aggressive interactions with humans.
With sensitive and painful intimacy, Polar Bear dramatizes Mandel’s struggles to overcome trauma as he returns to the scene of the attack. Against the backdrop of global warming, his intensely personal journey is effectively placed in a wider context.
Fortunately, instead of using unintelligible scientific statistics and language, the film constructs the conversation about global warming in a thoroughly engaging and accessible way, allowing us to bear the untold human cost of it . The film argues that if we dare continue to destroy the planet and all its natural elements, nature will inevitably fight back.
