Award-winning filmmaker and cinematographer Abraham Joffe said he was “shocked” to discover that polar bears – widely regarded as symbols of the climate crisis – continue to be traded internationally, as his hard-hitting investigative documentary Trade Secret made its Middle East debut at the landmark 10th edition of the Xposure International Photography Festival (2026) on Saturday.

Directed by Joffe, the documentary examines how polar bears continue to move through a global trade system that operates both within and alongside existing regulations, challenging long-held assumptions about wildlife protection, conservation policy, and commerce.

Following the screening at the festival’s Hadara stage, South African investigative journalist Adam Cruise, who led the investigation across multiple countries, described the film as an effort to document “what happens when protection exists on paper, but not always in practice.”

The film follows Cruise over six years as he traces the movement of polar bear skins from Canada to international markets. Canada is the only one of the five polar bear range states that permits international commercial trade. According to Cruise, approximately 700 polar bears are killed each year for trade from an estimated global population of 20,000. “When you factor in illegal trade, the real number could be much higher,” he said. “We don’t know if it’s a thousand, maybe 1,500 bears a year. That’s a percentage of the population being removed every single year.”

Running just under two hours, Trade Secret also documents how legal trade has operated in parallel with unauthorised routes, including shipments passing through Norway’s former free-trade zone in Svalbard. The film reveals that, following the investigation, Norwegian authorities moved to close that loophole. “This movie stopped that,” Cruise said.

A key section of the documentary focuses on efforts led by Cruise and the investigative team to uplist polar bears to Appendix I of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) – an international agreement between 185 parties designed to ensure that trade in wild animals and plants does not threaten their survival. Such an uplisting would ban international commercial trade while allowing Indigenous subsistence hunting. Norway commissioned a first-of-its-kind independent report into Canada’s polar bear trade and pushed for the uplisting ahead of the June 17, 2022 deadline at the CITES Convention in Panama.

The film also examines the role of major conservation organisations, which Cruise said were compelled to publicly re-examine their positions on trade and trophy hunting. “On the one hand, they say one thing. Behind closed doors, something else happens,” he said.

Previously premiered in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe, Trade Secret’s Middle Eastern screening reinforces Xposure 2026’s position as a platform for global investigative storytelling and urgent conversations that extend beyond visual practice.

Joffe will join Cruise for a longer public conversation at the festival on February 2, 2026.