Geeta Gandbhir, the director of the new Netflix documentary The Perfect Neighbor, uses police body‑camera footage to tell a story that many Black Americans feel is hard to see.
The film shows how a white Florida woman, Susan Lorincz, shot and killed her Black neighbor, 35‑year‑old Ajike Owens, through the front door of her rental home in June 2023. The footage, which runs almost twenty‑five hours, is shown from the very beginning of the conflict to the moment police arrive.
Lorincz had a record of calling the police on neighbors who let their children play near her property. After Owens began banging on Lorincz’s door, asking her to leave, Lorincz told the police she was afraid for her life and that she could use Florida’s stand‑your‑ground law.
The law says you can use deadly force if you feel threatened. In 2024, she pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and was sentenced to 25 years in prison. She did not get jail time for the people who lost their lives.
Gandbhir says body‑camera footage often “criminalizes people of color” and can become a tool for police surveillance. She wanted to reverse that logic and use it to humanize a community that had been viewed as a nuisance.
The film feels like a thriller because the footage moves quickly at the beginning—ten or more officers scramble to the scene—and slows down to show the raw, emotional exchanges that followed.
We didn’t do any talking‑head interviews or traditional documentary framing. The crew stitched together police shots, cell‑phone recordings, dash‑cam videos and detective interviews to reconstruct the timeline.
The result is a raw, immersive narrative with few voice‑over narrators. The few voice‑overs are from police detective interviews and a funeral recording of Owens’s mother, Pamela Dias, who has been supportive of the project.
The film invites viewers into the tense moments after the shooting, including a scene where police are trying to revive Owens. “We did not want to exploit these moments,” said Gandbhir. “We made sure to show enough for the audience to see what happened, but not too much that it turned into a gratuitous display.”
The premiere at the New York Film Festival led to a Sundance Directing Award for Gandbhir. While Netflix may push the documentary into an Oscar campaign, the director sees the movie’s real power in sparking a call to action: reforming stand‑your‑ground laws and gun regulations that disproportionately put Black communities at risk. “If you have the numbers, you can see hundreds of extra deaths each year caused by these laws,” she explained.
Lewandowski, it’s clear that the documentary is more than a story. It pushes viewers to bear witness to a kind of violence that many reports filter out of the news. Through the use of body‑camera footage, The Perfect Neighbor presents an unfiltered view of a tragedy that became a political flashpoint — one that continues to ripple through the community, the legal system, and public conscience.
Source: New York Post
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