Geeta Gandbhir is no stranger to the spotlight.
The 55-year-old American filmmaker has been mentored by Spike Lee and Sam Pollard.
Documentary films she worked on with them have won multiple awards. These include Emmys for When the Levees Broke (2006), a four-hour film about the devastation of New Orleans by 2005’s Hurricane Katrina and by the government neglect that followed in its wake. And a Peabody award for exceptional journalism for the sequel, If God is Willing and da Creek Don’t Rise (2010).
Yet this year is distinctly different.
She has been nominated for two best director Oscars: for the documentary feature The Perfect Neighbor, and the 31-minute documentary short, The Devil is Busy.
Very few women directors have been nominated for an Oscar; let alone for two projects in the same year. It was only in 2010, in fact, that a woman won the Oscar for Best Director (Kathryn Bigelow; for The Hurt Locker). “Why are women relegated like this? It feels bizarre, you know?” she says.
It’s that kind of question that leads to her filmmaking. Why did a White woman in Florida, annoyed by the noise of children playing near her home, think she could get away with killing a Black mother of four? Why would an ex-convict turn up outside an abortion clinic to shout intimidating slogans at strangers; why would a woman quietly mourning her two infants choose to work amid such hostility every day?
The first of these questions underpins The Perfect Neighbor, set in the town of Ocala, Florida, in 2022-23. The answer to the second unfolds in The Devil is Busy.
Both offer a visceral, almost-uncomfortable sense of being at the scene as the action unfolds. It is this — in addition to the themes and unusual access — that make Gandbhir’s storytelling unique.
The Perfect Neighbor, for instance, unfolds largely via police bodycam footage, presented in chronological order with minimal narration. One would expect this to become monotonous, but the slow unravelling of the future shooter, and the “gosh-not-this-again” response of the neighbourhood and the system, leave the viewer, who knows what is to come, aghast at the sheer ordinariness of criminality.
Then the shots are fired; the woman, 35-year-old Ajike Owens, is dead; and there is nothing ordinary about the moments that follow. An ex-husband is told he is now sole parent to his four children; he must call his ex-wife’s mother to tell her what has happened. As his former mother-in-law gasps in strangled sobs on the phone, he goes into a huddle with the children, who had a loving, vibrant mother hours ago and now have none.
The footage the viewer has already seen leaves no doubt as to what happened; there is no room for “what if” or “could it be”. There is just a senseless, violent crime, and the tragedy it is starting to leave in its wake.
“Our communities of colour are criminalised after something terrible happens to us. Our children are adultified. The footage we gathered that makes that impossible to do here,” says Gandbhir, the “we” a reference to her Indian origins.
In this sense, she adds, the people whose stories she tells are “collaborators” rather than “subjects”. There are of one reality with her, a shared world; one that seems, all too often, determined to find ways to other them.
Owens was a family friend, Gandbhir says. When her shooter, Susan Lorincz, was returned home without a charge, because of a debate over whether Florida’s stand-your-ground laws applied, a community made up of the Black woman’s family, friends and neighbours decided to keep the fight alive, and ensure that the case to at least got to trial (Lorincz was eventually convicted).
“Keeping the story alive was vitally important,” Gandbhir says. The idea for the film came out of that.
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The format of the documentary is a political statement too.
“I think representation is incredibly important on film. It’s important to have it particularly in documentaries because this format, in many ways, started out as a colonial exercise,” Gandbhir says. She cites the example of Nanook of the North (1922), written, directed and edited by Robert J Flaherty. The silent film blends elements of documentary and docudrama to chronicle the daily “struggles” of an Inuk man and his family in the Canadian Arctic. It is exoticisation at best; exploitative at worst; othering, any way one looks at it.
“You have someone from outside a community coming into the community. Often there’s a skewed power dynamic, and that work could be very extractive. That, to me, is troubling,” she says.
By contrast, the best documentaries do not point a lens at an unfamiliar culture and, in a monotone, seek to generate amazement at its ways. Instead, the lens disappears. There is no narrator. The subjects, not the viewer, remain at the heart of the story.
This is important, Gandbhir says. “In frightening times, it is vital to tell the truth the best way one can.” For her, that has always been cinema.
She grew up in Massachusetts in a large, extended family. “I had a happy childhood,” she says. She majored in visual arts and cross-cultural anthropology at State University of New York (SUNY). Later, at Harvard University, she studied visual arts with a focus on animation, and took courses in women’s studies.
Filmmaking, for her now, is about more than correcting the record, preserving the truth and securing for the invisible a face and a voice; though all those are vastly important too. Filmmaking, for her, is about driving change.
“After The Perfect Neighbor, my sister-in-law, Takema Robinson, an executive producer on the film, co-founded the Standing in the Gap fund, an organisation that helps families affected by race-based violence, and works to push back against stand your ground laws, state by state,” she says.
In the wake of The Devil is Busy, Gandbhir and her team are working alongside Planned Parenthood and other organisations fighting for reproductive justice. “The impact is what I hope people get involved in.”
If we cannot drive change, in our deeply fractured world, she adds, we will have failed the young ones. “My college-going children will not accept my apology. They’ll ask: What did you do to fix it. I have no other skills. I’m a filmmaker. So I want to create work that is at the intersection of art and activism.”
What’s next? Given the state of things, perhaps a political comedy, Gandbhir says.
(Geeta Gandbhir’s documentaries are available on Netflix and JioHotstar. The Oscars will be awarded on March 16)
