We’ve seen police cam footage on many true crime shows. But we haven’t seen a movie like “The Perfect Neighbor,” which goes back in time to stitch together a chilling portrait of a murder.
When the film won the Sundance 2025 U.S. Documentary Directing Award, editor-turned-director Geeta Gandbhir knew “there was probably nothing like it,” she said last week on Zoom. Already, the film has earned six nominations for the Critics Choice Documentary Awards, as well as a spot on the Oscar-predictive DOC NYC Short List.
When Gandbhir first found out about the murder of Ocala, Florida resident Ajike “AJ” Shantrell Owens, 35, who left four children motherless on June 2, 2023 when her white neighbor, Susan Lorincz, shot and killed her, Gandbhir was mourning a family friend.
“It was grief work for us,” she said. “It was my way of processing what had happened. Ajike was close to two of my husband’s cousins, we’re all very close. That connection felt personal. The making of the film, because I have no other skills, frankly, and I don’t know how to do anything else, was what I had to offer the family, and also a way of processing. I wanted to understand how this could happen: how does someone pick up a gun and murder their neighbor over such a trivial dispute, over some nonsense like kids playing in a yard?”
While the filmmaker had edited many film and TV documentaries, and turned to directing fifteen years ago (winning Emmys for “When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Two Acts” and “By the People: The Election of Barack Obama”), she often shared directing credit. Not this time.
When Gandbhir first got her hands on the video footage in September 2023, it was overwhelming. “All the material that pertained to the case came to us through the lawyers for the family.” Everything came from the police on a thumb drive: Ring camera, dash cam, cell phone, and body camera footage, detective interviews, 911 calls from both Susan and the community.
“It came in a jumble,” said Gandbhir. “It was not organized in any way. I took it upon myself to string it out. We were able to watch through it in pieces, but we didn’t understand how many police were on scene. Sometimes there were two, sometimes there were 15, or some much larger number. We needed to figure out the chronology. I’d never seen any footage proceeding a crime like this, material that went back two years. So I took that material and strung it out into a timeline and spent a couple of weeks literally syncing it. It was detective work. I felt compelled, I had to know. There was this need to understand.”
Once the material was stretched out in a line, Gandbhir saw a movie in it. “We got the footage in September,” she said. “By October, which is when I had strung it out: ‘Holy shit, we could do this.’”
Gandbhir and fellow producer Nikon Kwantu both saw how to use the police cam footage: “It functioned inadvertently, like multi-camera,” she said. “One would split off and talk to this person, another would split off and talk to that person. And, we’ve all been obsessed with films like ‘Paranormal Activity’ or ‘Cloverfield’ or ‘The Blair Witch Project,’ where it’s that first-person POV. It looked immersive. After those two months: ‘There’s a film. I know how to make this.’”
First Gandbhir got permission from Ajike Owens’ mother, Pamela Diaz. “She wanted her daughter’s name not to be forgotten. She takes a lot of strength from Mamie Till, Emmett Till’s mother, who opened the casket at the funeral for him after he was lynched, and told the reporters to come and take pictures, because she really wanted the world to know what happened to her baby,” she said. “[Pamela] wants to push back, turn her pain into purpose, and hopes that this gun violence wouldn’t happen to another family. We thought we would try to do something quick.”
Recognizing the daunting task ahead, Gandbhir brought in her own editor, Viridiana Lieberman. “We started together and made the commitment to live in the body camera footage,” said Gandbhir. “The body camera footage is undeniable. There’s no reporter on the ground. I’m not on the ground. We’re not there influencing things, in this time period where people are constantly questioning the media, and what bias there might be. Sure, you have the cops who are an institution in themselves, but this is an interaction free of a journalist being there. It’s just what happened, right? So we felt that for an audience, the footage would be undeniable.”
What the filmmakers were able to do was recreate two years of incidents leading up to the crime. “These crimes unfortunately happen like every week,” Gandbhir said. “You get gun violence, but you only see the aftermath. You never get to see the community as they were before, in such detail. And again, police body camera footage is for people of color: it’s a violent tool of the state, right? It’s often used to criminalize us, dehumanize us. It’s used for surveillance. It’s used to protect the police. But I wanted to subvert that.”
The movie, somewhat surprisingly, reveals a multi-racial Florida community raising children together, mostly in harmony, except for the one single white woman who keeps calling the cops. “You do see this in Florida,” said Gandbhir, “having this social network, a safety network for their children. You see the father who says, ‘I take care of all these kids like they’re my own,’ the mother who says, when the cop [asks], ‘Which kid is yours?’ she [says], ‘They’re all mine.’ You see the kids are safe. They feel safe. They feel secure. They know that they have multiple parents watching out for them. … It’s not a wealthy neighborhood by any means. But again, that safety network where the kids can just play safe in the street.”
And “The Perfect Neighbor” shows the cops in a southern state behaving in relatively benign, empathetic ways. “The issue of the police is fascinating, because it evokes different things for different people,” said Gandbhir. “The police, we don’t see them come in guns blazing, beating people or anything. But they never see Susan as a threat. Susan weaponized her race and privilege, and she tried to weaponize the police against the community. Susan used hate speech against children. She waved a gun at them. She was constantly harassing and threatening her neighbors. She called the police. She kept abusing the 911 emergency services. By the third time she called, she should have been flagged, right? They just treated her as this nuisance.”
While the police put in an awful lot of time on these calls, “they didn’t protect the community from her,” said Gandbhir. “They didn’t tell the community what they could do: you could also file harassment charges against her. They didn’t tell Susan: ‘Your behavior is actually inappropriate, your behavior is threatening. You need to stop.’ The police are not trained in mediation. They’re trained to deal with crime. And if they could not manage it, then the social workers should have been called in. But instead, they left it to fester, even though Susan also showed erratic behavior. She drove her truck into a gate multiple times, then claimed that she had a panic attack. And yet, she was able to buy two guns. What we see is that the system failed the community, but it also failed Susan. It didn’t save her from herself. She’s in prison for almost the rest of her life because of this. The police were kind, the majority of them were polite, as individuals. But it’s the system. The system is not equipped. The system failed.”
What would Gandbhir change? Among other things, the Stand Your Ground laws that led to the death of Trayvon Martin and people shooting strangers approaching their front door. “People are emboldened by this law,” said Gandbhir. “They essentially commit crimes and then claim that they were fearful of their life. And particularly for Black and Brown folks who are so often criminalized and perceived as a threat due to implicit bias, racism, that makes it really dangerous. And the laws exist in different forms across about 38 states under the Castle Doctrine: You have the right to protect your castle. But unfortunately, like so many things in this country, reform is deeply needed.”
The film avoids labeling Susan Lorincz as “crazy” or “mentally ill.” “There was a psychiatric assessment of her prior to the trial to see if mental illness played into her committing this crime,” said Gandbhir. “They found there was none. The judge ruled that she shot more out of anger than fear. We are careful around the mental illness thing, because the majority of people who have mental illness harm no one. Often, when people commit violent crimes, that is raised, ‘Oh, the person is mentally ill.’ But it was not a factor in the case.”
So her aberrant behavior was anxiety-driven? “The judge ruled that he gave her five years off because he thought she may have had some PTSD from a traumatic childhood,” said Gandbhir. “You can see this in the trial. She’d never committed a crime before of that, of that gravity. So the maximum is 30 years. She got five years off for manslaughter.”
There is some supplemental new footage in the film to give the audience a rest. “We shot some some stuff on the ground, for sure, when we were first there,” said Gandbhir. “We shot some vigils. But we didn’t do sit down interviews. We shot B roll, and under that we put the police or detective interviews. Those were meant to be interstitials, to give people a break, because the body camera footage is relentless. And we needed the community to weigh in. There is a lot of Susan, obviously, and her complaints, and there’s some of Ajike, but in order to get the full picture, the community was really important. So we wanted them to have a voice.”
When Netflix picked up “The Perfect Neighbor” out of Sundance, after they recouped their costs, the filmmakers put the lion’s share of the licensing fee into a fund for Diaz and the kids. “We need a groundswell around this issue,” said Gandbhir. “We need a global audience. I made the film to be a piece of art, but I’m hoping to inspire people to take action.”
Will the film set a new narrative video trend, much like the Oscar-nominated short “Incident” or even the fictional scripted “Adolescence”? “We’re living in a world where it’s familiar,” she said. “You look at Tiktok, you look at all the social media, it’s all user-generated content, right? We live in a world where it is not just that cinema reflects the world and the world reflects art. We’re like cinema. Certainly, in this doc genre, they’ll be demanding more as we have maybe set a trend in that way, but it’s something that exists all around us.”
“The Perfect Neighbor” is now streaming on Netflix.
Next up: For the series “Katrina: Come Hell or High Water,” which has played well on Netflix, Gandbhir and Spike Lee both directed episodes. And a short just came out on HBO: “The Devil Is Busy,” partnered with Soledad O’Brien productions.