Thank you to everyone who tuned into my live video with the wonderful . It was incredible to learn more about Geeta’s early career, how she worked for the animator Suzan Pitt before (literally) chasing Spike Lee down and getting a job with him. This led to her working as the Emmy-winning lead editor on Lee’s seminal documentary When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (2006), and her long-term creative collaboration with documentary legend Sam Pollard (with whom she founded Message Pictures).
We started out talking about how Geeta and I met in 2017 as fellow recipients of the Chicken & Egg Award (at that time, it was called the “Breakthrough Award”), an unrestricted grant for mid-career female and gender-expansive filmmakers. Around that time, Geeta was seeking to establish herself more as a director and less as an editor.
Geeta shared how The Perfect Neighbor came to exist out of necessity and grief, her personal connection to the story, how she knew there was a movie in the 30 hours of body cam and other evidentiary material she was given access to, how her independent film ended up on the Netflix Top 10, and what it was like to end up with one of the biggest docs of 2025, including her history-making turn as an Oscar nominee for both Best Documentary Feature and Best Documentary Short (for The Devil is Busy) in the same year.
Geeta also generously shared a really emotional view of what the comedown from all of that feels like, how she might be just now finally processing her grief, and what she’s working on now.
Finally, check out Standing in the Gap Fund.
