How We Get Free

Directors

Geeta Gandbhir, Samantha Knowles

Executive Producers

Nicholas Kulish, Sam Dolnick, Anya Rous

Producers

Kathleen Lingo, Sweta Vohra, Jess Devaney

Editor

Rabab Haj Yahya

Consulting Editor

Co-Editor

Assistant Editor

Cinematographer

Julia Liu

Additional Cinematography

Music

Sound

Narration

Contact

Inspired by a New York Times article, How We Get Free follows the intrepid Elisabeth Epps over the course of two years as she works to abolish cash bail in Colorado and put an end to the criminalization of poverty. Epps is the founder and leader of the Colorado Freedom Fund, one of nearly 100 community bail funds around the country that help incarcerated people who can’t afford their bail before trial. For Epps, this work is personal – she spent time in jail herself, bearing witness to the conditions she is so desperate to change. The film opens in the fall of 2020 as she drives around Denver with thousands of dollars of cashiers checks in hand, bailing people out of jail (or as Epps says, “paying ransom”), and sparring with the local Sheriff about the future of policing. But after years of grassroots activism, and on the heels of the 2020 racial reckoning, Epps is confronting a new challenge: calls from her community to run for State Representative.

Director, The Perfect Neighbor

Geeta Gandbhir is an award-winning filmmaker. She embarked on a career in narrative film under the guidance of Spike Lee and Sam Pollard. After working for eleven years in scripted film, collaborating with renowned figures such as the Coen Brothers, Robert Altman, and others, she transitioned into documentary filmmaking. She is currently directing a series for Netflix with Spike Lee and Samantha Knowles, which is a retrospective on New Orleans post-Katrina.

As a Director, recent credits include The Perfect Neighbor, which premiered at Sundance in 2025, short film Reclaimed for Sesame Workshop, The Devil is Busy for HBO, the Oscar Shortlisted film How We Get Free for HBO, the series Born in Synanon for Paramount, the series Eyes on the Prize for HBO, the feature doc Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power, which was nominated for the 2022 Critics Choice Award, won a 2023 SIMA Award, and won a 2023 Emmy Award. She directed and show-ran the series Black and Missing for HBO, which won a 2022 NAACP Award for Best Directing, a 2022 Independent Spirit Award for Best Documentary Series, a 2022 ATAS Honors Award, and a Cinema Eye Honors for Best Series. She directed the film Apart, with Rudy Valdez, for HBO Max, which was nominated for an NAACP Award and won a 2022 Emmy Award.

Co-Director, How We Get Free

Samantha (Sam) Knowles is an award-winning Brooklyn-based filmmaker. Most recently she won the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Directing in a Documentary Series, and the Gracie Award for Best Director of a National TV Program for the HBO docuseries Black and Missing, which brings attention to black and missing persons cases that are routinely neglected by the police and the media. The series also won the Independent Spirit Award for Best Documentary Series, a Television Academy Honors Award, an AAFCA TV Award for Best Documentary, and was nominated for a Black Reel Award for Outstanding Documentary. In 2021, she partnered with Hewlett – Packard to direct Generation Impact: The Coder, which was featured in the inaugural “Brand Storytelling” event at Sundance Film Festival. In 2018, she directed The Blue Line which examined the controversy that erupted when a small town painted a blue line on the street in support of police in the midst of the Black Lives Matter movement. It premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, was featured in NBC’s “Meet The Press” Film Festival, and is now part of the prestigious New York Times Op-Doc series. Samantha also directed and produced the award-winning short documentary Why Do You Have Black Dolls? which is inspired by a question asked of an 8-year-old girl and examines the history and significance of the black doll.