We have seen footage of the police on many 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 film won the Sundance 2025 US Documentary Directing Award, editor-turned-director Geeta Gandbhir knew “there probably wasn’t anything like it,” she said last week on Zoom. Already the film has won six nominations for Critics Choice Documentary Awardsas well as a place on the Oscar prediction DOC NYC Short List.
When Gandbhir first learned of 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 grieving 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 are all very close. That connection felt personal. Making the film, because I honestly have no other skills, and I don’t know how to do anything else, was what I had to offer the family, and also a way to process. I wanted to understand how this could happen to a neighbor like this: how could it happen and how a neighbor like this could happen: dispute, over some nonsense like children 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 direction. Not this time.
When Gandbhir first got hold of the video footage in September 2023, it was overwhelming. “All material relating to the case came to us through the family’s lawyers.” Everything came from the police on a thumb drive: dash cam, dash cam, cell phone and body cam footage, detective interviews911 calls from both Susan and the community.
“It came in a jumble,” Gandbhir said. “It wasn’t organized in any way. I took it upon myself to string it out. We could look through it in bits and pieces, but we didn’t understand how many police officers were at the scene. Sometimes there were two, sometimes there were 15, or some much larger number. We needed to figure out the chronology. I had never seen any films that brought a crime like this, so I spent some time going back two years. a couple of weeks literally syncing it. It was detective work. I felt compelled, I had to know. There was a need to understand.”
Once the material was stretched out in a line, Gandbhir saw a film in it. “We got the footage in September,” she said. “By October at the latest, I’d put it out there: ‘Oh my God, we could do this.'”
Gandbhir and fellow producer Nikon Kwantu both saw how to use police camera footage: “It worked accidentally, like multi-camera,” she said. “One would split and talk to this person, another would split and talk to that person. And we’ve all been obsessed with movies like ‘Paranormal Activity’ or ‘Cloverfield’ or ‘The Blair Witch Project,’ where it’s that first-person POV. It looked immersive. After the two months: ‘There’s a movie. I know how to make this one.”
First, Gandbhir got permission from Ajike Owen’s 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 child,” she said. “(Pamela) wants to push back, turn her pain into purpose and hope this gun violence doesn’t happen to another family. We thought we’d try to do something fast.”
Recognizing the daunting task before him, Gandbhir brought in his own editor, Viridiana Lieberman. “We started together and made a commitment to live in the body cam footage,” Gandbhir said. “The body camera footage is undeniable. There’s no reporter on the ground. I’m not there. We’re not there influencing things, in this time period where people are constantly questioning the media and what bias there can be. Sure, you have the police officers who are an institution in themselves, but this is an interaction free of a journalist being there. So, what kind of audience would that 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 society as it was before, in such detail. And again, police body cam footage is for people of color: it’s a violent tool of the state, right? It’s used a lot to criminalize us, dehumanize us. It’s used for surveillance. It’s used to protect the police.”
The film, somewhat surprisingly, reveals a multiracial Florida community raising children together, mostly in harmony, except for the one white woman who keeps calling the police. “You see this in Florida,” Gandbhir said, “has this social network, a safety network for their children. You see the father saying, ‘I take care of all these children like they’re my own,’ the mother saying when the police (ask), ‘Which child is yours?’ she (says), ‘They are all mine.’ You see that the children are safe. They feel safe. They feel safe. They know they have several parents who look up to them. … It’s not a rich neighborhood by any means. But again, that safety net where the kids can just play safely on the street.”
And “The Perfect Neighbor” shows the cops in a southern state behaving in a relatively benign, empathetic manner. “The police question is fascinating, because it evokes different things for different people,” Gandbhir said. “The police, we don’t see them come in guns blazing, beat 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 constantly harassed and threatened her neighbors. She called the police a third time. called, she should have been flagged, right? They just treated her like this nuisance.”
While police spent an inordinate amount of time on those calls, “they didn’t protect the community from her,” Gandbhir said. “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 have to stop.” The police are not trained in mediation. They are trained to deal with crime. And if they couldn’t do that, then the social workers should have been called in. But instead they let it stand, even though Susan also displayed erratic behavior. She drove her truck into a gate several times and then claimed she had a panic attack. And yet she was able to buy two guns. What we see is that the system failed society, but it also failed Susan. It didn’t save her from herself. She is in prison for almost the rest of her life because of this. The police were nice, the majority of them were polite, as individuals. But that’s the system. The system is not equipped. The system failed.”
What would Gandbhir change? Including the Stand Your Ground laws that led to the death of Trayvon Martin and people shooting strangers who approached their front door. “People are emboldened by this law,” Gandbhir said. “They basically commit crimes and then claim they were in fear of their lives. And especially for black and brown people who are so often criminalized and perceived as a threat because of implicit bias, racism, that makes it really dangerous. And the laws exist in different forms in about 38 states under the castle doctrine: You have the right to protect your castle, but there’s an unfortunate lot of reform in this country. It’s needed.”
The film avoids labeling Susan Lorincz as “crazy” or “mentally ill”. “There was a psychiatric assessment done on her before the trial to see if mental illness played a role in her committing this crime,” Gandbhir said. “They found there was none. The judge ruled that she shot more out of anger than fear. We’re careful about the mental illness thing, because the majority of people who have mental illness don’t hurt anybody. Often, when people commit violent crimes, it’s raised, ‘Oh, the person is mentally ill.’ But that wasn’t a factor in the case.”
So her deviant behavior was anxiety driven? “The judge decided he gave her five years off because he believed she may have had PTSD from a traumatic childhood,” Gandbhir said. “You can see this in the trial. She had never committed a crime before of that seriousness. So the maximum term is 30 years. She got five years off for manslaughter.”
There are some more new footage in the movie to give the audience a rest. “We shot some stuff on the ground, for sure, when we were there first,” Gandbhir said. “We shot some vigils. But we didn’t do sit-down interviews. We shot B-roll, and underneath that we put in police or detective interrogations. They were meant to be interstitial shots, to give people pause, because the body cam footage is relentless. And we needed the community to weigh in. There’s a lot of Susan, obviously, and her grievances in order, and part of the community in order, and yup. was really important. So we wanted them to have a voice.”
When Netflix picked up “The Perfect Neighbor” from Sundance, after recouping their costs, the filmmakers put the lion’s share of the licensing fee into a fund for Diaz and the kids. “We need a tidal wave around this issue,” Gandbhir said. “We need a global audience. I made the film to be a work of art, but I hope to inspire people to act.”
Will the film set a new narrative video trend, much like the Oscar-nominated short film “Incident” or even the fictional script “Adolescence”? “We live in a world where it’s familiar,” she said. “You look at Tiktok, you look at all social media, it’s all user-generated content, right? We live in a world where it’s not just film reflecting the world and the world reflecting art. We’re like film. Sure, in this doc genre, they’re going to demand more because maybe we’ve set a trend that way, but it’s something 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 directed both episodes. And a short film just came out on HBO: “The Devil Is Busy,” along with Soledad O’Brien productions.
