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Geeta Gandbhir to receive Impact Award at Documentary Film Festival
She will be honoured at North America’s longest-running nonfiction film festival following the premiere of her Sundance-award-winning documentary.
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Malvika Choudhary - Mon, 29, Sep 2025
- 14:03 EDT
- 20
Geeta Gandbhir / The Center for Independent Documentary (CID)
Indian-American filmmaker Geeta Gandbhir will be honored with the Impact Award at the 34th Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival (HSDFF), the longest-running nonfiction film festival in North America.
The festival runs from Oct. 10 to 18, with Emmy and Peabody Award-winning Gandbhir’s award presentation scheduled to follow the screening of her Netflix documentary The Perfect Neighbor on Oct. 12.
Also Read: Geeta Gandbhir’s ‘The Perfect Neighbor’ to stream on Netflix
The Perfect Neighbor, which will stream globally on Oct. 17, examines the fatal shooting of Ajike “AJ” Owens by a neighbour in Florida, weaving police body camera footage and personal accounts into a larger reflection on race, justice, and community trauma.
The 97-minute feature won the Directing Award for U.S. Documentary at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Raised in Boston, Gandbhir is the daughter of Indian immigrants—her father Sharad moved to the United States in the 1960s to study chemical engineering, later joined by her mother Lalita.
A Harvard University graduate, Ganbhir studied visual art and animation before beginning her career under the mentorship of Spike Lee and Sam Pollard. Her siblings include judge Una S. Gandbhir of Alaska’s Third Judicial District and filmmaker-editor Ashwin Gandbhir.
Gandbhir’s career spans both narrative and documentary cinema. She collaborated on Spike Lee’s Malcolm X early in her career and later served as editor of If God Is Willing and da Creek Don’t Rise, an HBO documentary on post-Katrina New Orleans that earned a 2010 Peabody Award.
Her extensive credits include Hungry to Learn, I Am Evidence, and Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power. She also co-directed the PBS series Asian Americans, which won a 2020 Peabody Award, and won a 2022 Emmy Award for Through Our Eyes: Apart.
More recently, Gandbhir directed Born in Synanon for Paramount+ and co-directed Katrina: Come Hell and High Water for Netflix alongside Spike Lee and Samantha Knowles.
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