By Paul Salfen for AMFM Magazine – November 10, 2025
Geeta Gandbhir still remembers the day she chased Spike Lee down a Cambridge sidewalk. Fresh out of Harvard, living in her parents’ basement, and armed with nothing but a backpack and nerve, the 21-year-old turned around, marched back, and “begged him for a job…I had nothing to lose,” she recalls with a laugh. Lee hired her on the spot. That sidewalk sprint became the first frame of a career that now includes two Peabody Awards, an Emmy, and, this month, a Critics Choice Documentary Award for The Perfect Neighbor—a film that turns two years of police body-camera footage into a white-knuckle thriller about race, guns, and the fragility of the American neighborhood.
From Boston Basement to Sundance Stage
Born in the Boston area to Indian immigrants—father Sharad arrived in the 1960s to study chemical engineering, mother Lalita followed after the 1965 Immigration Act—Gandbhir grew up in a household where the worst sin was to be “useless.” Her sister Una became a Superior Court judge in Anchorage; her brother Ashwin, a filmmaker and editor. At Harvard, Gandbhir studied visual art with a focus on animation, but the real education happened outside the classroom. Spike Lee was teaching while cutting Malcolm X; editor Sam Pollard was in the mix. Gandbhir’s persistence landed her in Lee’s orbit, then on his sets, and finally behind the editing bay of HBO’s If God Is Willing and da Creek Don’t Rise (2010 Peabody winner).
Documentary became her medium of purpose. Hungry to Learn, I Am Evidence, the PBS series Asian Americans (2020 Peabody), the Emmy-winning short Through Our Eyes: Apart, the Paramount+ series Born in Synanon—each project asked audiences to see society clearer and act kinder. In 2025 she reunited with Lee and Samantha Knowles for Netflix’s Katrina: Come Hell and High Water, but it is The Perfect Neighbor—premiering at Sundance on January 24—that has seized the cultural moment.
A Horror Film in Real Time
The film begins with a doorbell ring and ends in gunfire. In June 2023, Ajike “AJ” Owens, a Black mother of four, was shot and killed through her neighbor’s front door in Ocala, Florida, by Susan Lorincz, a white woman who had spent two years terrorizing the interracial cul-de-sac’s children. Lorincz’s own Ring camera and the responding deputies’ body cams captured everything: the escalating threats, the racial slurs, the final fatal shot. Gandbhir received the footage from the family’s attorneys and saw not just evidence, but cinema.
“I wanted to craft something that played like a thriller or a horror film,” Gandbhir says, “because that’s what this community lived through.” The result is 87 minutes of relentless dread: kids playing, parents watching, one neighbor unraveling. Eight states currently mandate body-cam release; Florida is not one of them. “We have to be thankful this happened now,” Gandbhir notes. “Years ago it would have been buried.”
AJ’s mother, Pamela Dias, gave the project her blessing. “Turn pain into purpose,” she told Gandbhir. The director obliged, consulting Dias at every cut, ensuring the film became a call to action: be an upstander, not a bystander; rethink easy access to guns; see the neighbor before the threat.
The Editor Who Refused to Leave
Karma, it turns out, wears a cutting-room apron. Gandbhir’s editor on The Perfect Neighbor, Viridiana Lieberman, once refused to cede her seat when Gandbhir joined a project mid-stream. “I wouldn’t replace you if you want to stay,” Gandbhir told her. The two have been inseparable since. “She’s incredible,” Gandbhir says. “I hope we do many more.”
Advice for the Next Generation
Aspiring storytellers flood Gandbhir’s inbox. Her counsel is blunt:
- Point of view + access = story.
- Ask: Is this a film? A podcast? A tweet thread? Choose the medium that serves the material.
- Visuals are non-negotiable. If you don’t have them, invent a new way in.
- Make the audience leave changed. Entertainment is fine; meaning is mandatory.
The Weekend Ahead
Gandbhir will miss Sunday’s Critics Choice Documentary Awards—she’s committed elsewhere—but her team will accept on her behalf. “I’m so excited for them to represent,” she says. Win or lose, the film is already doing its work: screenings spark heated conversations about red-flag laws, community policing, and who gets to feel safe in their own driveway.
From a Boston sidewalk to a Sundance stage, Geeta Gandbhir has spent three decades proving her parents wrong about one thing: usefulness can look like art. The Perfect Neighbor is streaming now on [platform redacted for awards eligibility]. Watch it with the lights on—then go check on your neighbors.
Geeta Gandbhir’s The Perfect Neighbor is nominated for Best Documentary Feature and Best Director at the 2025 Critics Choice Documentary Awards. Follow @AMFMMagazine for live updates from the ceremony.
