Director Geeta Gandbhir didn’t watch this year’s Oscar nominations announcement.
“I was too nervous,” she says. “I’ve been shortlisted before. When you watch and you’re not nominated, it’s really painful. I didn’t want to do that to myself again.”
This time, though, she didn’t just land one nomination, she earned two. Her feature “The Perfect Neighbor,” composed almost entirely of body-cam police footage, chronicles the fatal shooting of Ajike Owens by her neighbor in a Florida neighborhood. It was selected for best documentary feature film. Her short “The Devil Is Busy,” a character-driven portrait of workers at a heavily protested Atlanta abortion clinic, was nominated for best documentary short film.
The dual nod capped an unusually strategic year: two politically urgent films, two distinct festival runs, and eventual distribution deals with Netflix and HBO. For filmmakers navigating today’s nonfiction landscape, Gandbhir’s journey offers a case study in how craft, structure, and smart festival positioning can amplify impact. “Both films are a microcosm of our society,” she says. “They hold a mirror up to the larger society and the problems that exist.”
Now, Gandbhir is reflecting not just on the nominations but on the craft and strategy that brought both films to the Academy’s doorstep.
Let the footage shape the form.
Ajike Owens was a family friend of Gandbhir. On June 2, 2023, Owens was shot and killed by her neighbor Susan Louise Lorincz. Lorincz had been calling the police regarding various minor incidents in the neighborhood—mostly involving local children playing on the grass near her home—for the previous two years.
When Owens knocked on Lorincz’s door after one of these incidents, Lorincz shot through it rather than answering. Owens died of her injuries and Lorincz tried to claim she was acting in self-defense.
After learning about Owens’ death, Gandbhir looked to support her family in any way that she could. She had no plan to make a film about Owens’ death, until the body camera footage was sent to her by the family’s lawyers that September.
“Me and my team at Message Pictures strung out the footage really to help the lawyers, because they were confused by the footage. There was so much of it and it was out of order. We were just trying to be helpful.” After reviewing the footage, Gandbhir realized there was something incredibly powerful about the way it showed Lorincz constantly calling the police on the children and families in the neighborhood.
“It went back two years. You saw this beautiful, multiracial community that’s almost idyllic, as different parents supervise them all. Then there’s this one outlier who weaponizes her privilege and the police and is spurred on by the predatory stand-your-ground law. She decided to take matters into her own hands over what was a trivial matter and commit murder.”
The police’s body-camera and dash-camera footage, as well as the Ring and phone camera videos they collected as evidence, told the story in such a clear and impactful manner that Gandbhir saw similarities to found-footage horror films like “Paranormal Activity” and “The Blair Witch Project.” “It was a living nightmare. A real-life horror story. The police inadvertently function like a multi-cam. They didn’t mean to, but they did, because there were at least always two of them on scene with their cameras.”
After getting the footage in September 2023, Gandbhir and her creative team spent the next 16 months organizing and working on the 30 hours’ worth of material so that it seamlessly showed Lorincz’s actions leading up to the shooting, while also making sure it was ready for the big screen. “It was technically very difficult. We made it look seamless. But it took so much work.” The film premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival on January 24, a launchpad that would prove pivotal.
Find the character who unlocks the story.
Gandbhir spent well over six months simultaneously working on both “The Perfect Neighbor” and “The Devil Is Busy,” which she finished making in the spring of 2024.
She was initially approached by broadcast journalist Soledad O’Brien and her producing partner Amber Fares about making a documentary after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, eliminating the federal constitutional right to abortion and allowing individual states to enact bans—including six-week restrictions in some regions. The trio then spent a long time searching for the right lens through the rapidly shifting landscape.
“We’d ask ourselves, ‘What was the right entry point to this? What is the best way to tell this story in an interesting way that could draw people in? What’s an angle audiences haven’t seen?’ A super-important skill as a documentary filmmaker is to find an angle into things that can change people’s perspective. That’s what I try to do as a filmmaker.”
After briefly considering focusing the film on the people getting abortions, they found a women’s healthcare clinic in Atlanta where head of security Tracii looked to keep patients safe amid the constant protests outside. “We found the clinic to be so interesting. It was run predominantly by Black women. They were serving their community. But then suddenly they had to serve so many more people who were traveling from out of state.”
It was the warmth, humor, love, and toughness of Tracii that convinced Gandbhir to make the film primarily from her perspective, especially as she is religious and technically has the same faith as the protesters outside.
“She has a completely different take on it. Religion really plays strongly into her daily life. Meanwhile, you have these male protesters outside yelling, screaming, and claiming to have the same faith as her. But she has just chosen a completely different perspective and path. That comparison made her such an incredibly powerful entryway into the topic.”
Map your festival run early.
After it received critical acclaim at the Sundance Film Festival, “The Perfect Neighbor” was acquired by Netflix in March 2025. “Getting into Sundance opened many doors for us,” admits Gandbhir. Despite its success at Sundance, Gandbhir and her team still had to determine where the film’s international premiere would be, while they also knew it was vitally important to screen it in different parts of the United States, too.
“We wanted to premiere it in the South, Midwest, and West Coast. It helps to generate buzz. Even if you have made a sale, you want to get the word out about the film, plus it helps with the issues at the heart of it, too.”
“The Devil Is Busy” premiered at the New Orleans Film Festival in October 2024. “We knew we were too late to qualify for last year’s Oscars. So we did a different run and put it into festivals all year round.” It screened at festivals in Santa Barbara and Palm Springs, in California; Sedona, Arizona; Florida, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, and Atlanta, where the film is set.
Once again this helped to generate buzz for “The Devil Is Busy,” which was ultimately bought by HBO, where it premiered in September 2025. But while creating interest in the films was key, Gandbhir also revelled in being able to watch them in front of a keen audience of cinema fans. “It’s just a great way for audiences to see the films in theaters. There’s really nothing like the festival experience.”
