Fear of the bear? Rewilding, rural agencies and politics in two documentaries in Trentino and the Pyrenees

In Trentino and the Pyrenees, the population of bears has grown since the 1990s, when new specimens were released into the wild to recover this endangered species. The reintroduction generated a conflictive cohabitation with village dwellers, the shepherding sector, and rural initiatives in both areas. The aim of this research is to evaluate how local media and two audiovisual documentaries covered the bear issue in both regions. The researchers analysed the content of 86 articles from two newspapers in 2022, conducted a narrative analysis of the documentaries and interviewed their directors. The results reveal that the documentaries created a counter-narrative to politicisation, in the Italian case, and to environmentalisation, in the Catalan. Because both documentaries paid attention to rural communities, they contributed to increasing rural agency, an aspect aligned with the filmmakers’ motivations at the inception of both productions. The authors argue that the circulation of these narratives diversely expresses renewed imaginaries of rural societies in both contexts.