As Indian-American filmmaker Geeta Gandbhir earns two Oscar nominations for her work, here is how documentaries from India and Indian-origin filmmakers continue to gain ground in the Oscars’ nonfiction categories
Indian-American filmmaker Geeta Gandbhir earned two Oscar nominations, one in Best Documentary Feature for The Perfect Neighbor and another in Best Documentary Short for The Devil Is Busy — both first-time nominations in her career. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced the nominations for the 98th Academy Awards in Los Angeles on Thursday (January 22); the award ceremony will be held on March 15.
The Perfect Neighbor examines a real-life killing in Ocala, Florida, through largely police body-cam and dash-cam footage. The documentary unravels the mechanics of the incident, the institutional responses around it, and the racial and legal fault lines that shape how such violence is processed in contemporary America. The Devil Is Busy, co-directed with Christalyn Hampton, captures a day in the life of a clinic security head navigating protests and restrictions against abortion. Both films, in a way, tackle issues of race and violence.
Born to Indian immigrants in Boston
Gandbhir, who directs, produces and edits, grew up around Boston in a family of Indian immigrants. Her father, Sharad, came to the US from India in the 1960s to study chemical engineering. Her mother, Lalita, followed after immigration laws changed, and her sister, Una S. Gandbhir, is now a superior court judge in Alaska. Gandbhir studied visual art at Harvard. She was initially drawn to animation, and it was there that she crossed paths with Spike Lee and his longtime editor Sam Pollard. It was an encounter that redirected her towards filmmaking about politics and power, based on her lived experience.
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She began her career working in narrative cinema with Lee and Pollard before shifting fully into documentary, where her voice became sharper and more assured. As an editor, she worked on HBO’s If God Is Willing and da Creek Don’t Rise, Spike Lee’s film on post-Katrina New Orleans, which went on to win a Peabody. As a director, she has built a body of work that looks directly at systems; I Am Evidence to Through Our Eyes: Apart, which won an Emmy, and the Paramount+ series, Born in Synanon.
The Perfect Neighbor, her Netflix-backed feature, will compete with The Alabama Solution, Come See Me in the Good Light, Cutting Through Rocks, and Mr. Nobody Against Putin. The film reconstructs the 2023 killing of Ajike Owens, a 35-year-old Black mother of four who was shot dead in Ocala, Florida, by her white neighbour, Susan Lorincz. The case had hit the headlines after Lorincz attempted to invoke Florida’s controversial “stand your ground” law. The Perfect Neighbor premiered at Sundance in 2025 and won the directing award, while Katrina: Come Hell and High Water, co-directed with Lee, followed soon after.
Indian documentaries at the Oscars
Amid the usual fanfare around Best Picture, Best Director and acting categories, Indian filmmakers have made a conspicuous mark in nonfiction storytelling at the Oscars in recent years. In 2023, The Elephant Whisperers, directed by Kartiki Gonsalves and produced by Guneet Monga, became the first Indian documentary to win. The 39-minute Netflix documentary depicts the relationship between Bomman and Bellie, members of the Kattunayakan tribe in Tamil Nadu, and orphaned elephants Raghu and Ammu in the Mudumalai National Park. It was the first Indian documentary to win an Oscar.
A year prior to this, Writing With Fire, directed by Sushmit Ghosh and Rintu Thomas, had become the first Indian feature documentary to be nominated for the Oscar. The film tells the story of how Dalit women journalists transformed Khabar Lahariya, their rural, all-women-led newspaper, into a major digital publication. It was followed by All That Breathes in 2023, Shaunak Sen’s meditative account of two brothers rescuing black kites amid Delhi’s toxic air. It earned a nomination for Best Documentary Feature, following a strong festival run, including awards at Sundance and Cannes. The documentary framed an environmental crisis in humane, urgent terms. To Kill a Tiger was nominated in 2024 for its searing portrait of a father’s pursuit of justice after his daughter’s sexual assault in Jharkhand. These films signalled that Indian documentaries were no longer novelty entries but repeat contenders in the Academy’s nonfiction category.
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Long before this recent surge, Indian filmmakers had appeared intermittently in the documentary short race, beginning with Fali Bilimoria’s The House That Ananda Built (1968), the first Indian documentary to receive an Oscar nomination, followed by Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s An Encounter with Faces (1978) — it portrays the harsh lives of destitute and delinquent children in Mumbai’s Dongri and Mankhurd observation homes — and, decades later, St. Louis Superman, directed by Indian-American filmmaker Smriti Mundhra and Sami Khan.
