
“We Have to Think Deeply about Community Policing”: Geeta Gandbhir on The Perfect Neighbor

Geeta Gandbhir’s The Perfect Neighbor, which premiered in the US Documentary section of this year’s Sundance, is likely one of the first feature docs primarily composed of police body camera footage. Sifting through footage with editor Viridiana Liberman (The Sentence), Gandbhir builds out a suspenseful and heartbreaking portrait of neighborly violence in a close-knit Central Florida community, after white woman Susan Lorincz fatally shot Ajike Owens—Gandbhir’s sister-in-law’s best friend, though Gandbhir didn’t know Owens personally. Given the world context of a déjà vu US regime, the ongoing reverberations of Black Lives Matter and the steady bulldozing with anti-democratic and dangerous legislation to remove critical cultural studies from school curricula and to “protect” citizens with laws such as Stand Your Ground, Gandbhir’s documentary could not be more timely.
Filmmaker: I understand that Ajike Owens was your family friend, and that Ajike’s family had approached you to make a film after her passing. At some point after you began, you got access to the body camera footage. As a filmmaker, what was your initial reaction?
Gandbhir: Initially, we didn’t know if we were making a film; our point was to agitate, to bring attention to the case, to draw media to it, because we were concerned that Stand Your Ground would get in the way of Susan Lorincz’s coming to any sort of justice. They released her initially and we thought that she would walk. We weren’t sure—it’s Florida, there is a precedent for these issues with the Trayvon Martin case. So, we really began working with our family. My sister-in-law, Takema Robinson, is an organizer and very skilled at that. She activated her contacts. As we began the process of filming, we didn’t know when the trial would be—even after Susan was arrested, we were worried that the laws would get in the way.
A couple months in, the body camera footage came to us. There was a FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] that happened through the lawyers [through whom we obtained the footage]. It was astonishing. It was also heartbreaking to see. Oftentimes it’s just the day of, right? But this was two years that detailed a really clear portrait of both this beautiful close-knit community and the encroaching threat that was Susan.
We watched through all of it, really looking for things to help with the lawyers, to support the family with their case. I was like, “We have to incorporate this into the film.” And then very quickly, I was like, “Wait, no, this is the film. We have seen the aftermath of these things. Unfortunately, it happens way too many times. But we have not seen the before, the lead up.” It was so important to portray the community as they were—unfiltered, unadulterated, with no POV other than the police being there. They are reacting to the police, but still the police are in some ways a part of the community, wanted or unwanted.
Filmmaker: I was just thinking of Nickel Boys, which has been celebrated for how it reimagines the first person POV. Your film appears to be one of the first to use the body camera POV to this extent. Some reviewers have praised how you’re subverting the use of the body camera towards a kind of service to the community. So in the past few months, we have two films centering Black subjects that use the camera and POV in radical ways. Do you feel that you are using the body camera footage as a subversion?
Gandbhir: Obviously, body cameras are used by police to protect them, and for surveillance. We know there’s terrible overpolicing of Black communities that leads to deaths and great harm, that it’s all founded in systemic racism. I think for us subverting that was 100% part of what we want to do. And it’s interesting because the cops, unconsciously, gave us this beautiful view into the community, because they were embedded, they kept showing up. And then the fact that they went around speaking to different people, you organically meet the folks in the neighborhood, you meet Ajike, you see the children who are just being kids. You see the neighbor who says, “These are all my children.” This place was so harmonious before Susan. That was 100% the idea: we wanted to make this the community’s POV, even though the police are an outside force. In our film, they were not as terrible as you know they can be, but they’re still an outside force. But in a way, without realizing it, they gave us the material.
Filmmaker: While watching it, I had to keep revising my received view about the police in recent years. I had to ask myself if I was seeing correctly that these officers were believing the Black neighbors and thinking that Susan is someone to be discredited. It’s refreshing, even though you know you are seeing the exception rather than the rule. What do you take away from just this film about policing in the U.S?
Gandbhir: The police didn’t come in and terrorize the community as so often happens, but they were not also protecting the community in the way that they could and should have. This woman was not perceived as a threat, even though she was abusing children with racial epithets and threatening them. The children told the police that, but the cops did not go over to Susan and say, “You’re a nuisance.” She still was granted her white privilege, which she used throughout the film to manipulate the police and everyone she came in contact with. Again, they did not do egregious harm to the community, but there was neglect. Had Susan not been a white woman, they would have seen her as a threat. We have to think deeply about community policing. This is a step towards that.
Filmmaker: Just to be clear, with the body cam footage: the way it works is that there’s two cameras at each time because there’s two police officers dispatched for each incident?
Gandbhir: It depends. Sometimes you’ll see that there’s one camera until another officer arrives. Sometimes there are three officers, but one didn’t have their camera on. To figure out the timeline was a fascinating part of this, to line them up and recreate exactly what happened. That was a very deep, investigative part of the edit for us.
Filmmaker: I found it was easy for me as an audience member to watch the film because of the chronological linearity, date stamps and so on. Were you always going to go for that structure? Did you have an alternate structure in mind at any point?
Gandbhir: There were questions about what the open would be, to introduce the film. But we always felt that [the rest] would be linear. We wanted to stay true to the timeline. It’s through the chronology that you see the build, the slow boil that’s happening. You see it getting worse and worse. And as documentary filmmakers, it’s about truth telling too, so you have to stay within the timeline of facts.
Filmmaker: How can future filmmakers get access to body camera footage?
Gandbhir: There is an FOIA process. FOIA refers to the Freedom of Information Act. Our lawyers did a FOIA request for the Marion County Sheriff’s Department. It’s something that I believe everyone can do. I think right now [FOIA] is under a threat to a certain degree. It’s something that the current administration wants to change. So, it’s a really important tool that everybody should know about, that as citizens we have this ability to do this here, but it’s at risk, so we need to make sure we protect it.
Filmmaker: You have so many years of experience working with archival footage. Is there something about the body cam archive that feels different from working through other kinds of archives?
Gandbhir: What I find amazing about body cam footage is that plays like verité, like narrative. That’s amazing, but also weirdly disorienting. You are in the moment, in the community. You are walking around aware of the camera. I find that astonishing. It really brings an immediacy to it.
Filmmaker: Was there any time you felt that you wanted a break from it?
Gandbhir: Yes, and that’s why we have these interstitial moments where you have the tableaus and hear the voices of the community from the detective interviews. Meera Menon [director of the Sundance 2025 Midnight feature, Didn’t Die] said on one of the panels I was on that you learn as a director that you are the audience. Directors have to put themselves in the audience’s shoes. So, for me too, there are moments when the body camera footage could also feel relentless. To have these moments of reflection, to hear from the community and for some sort of context, we felt those could be useful. We built those intterstitial sections to give people some space and time to breathe, to absorb, to see something else.
Filmmaker: I found myself pondering about the nature of the body camera’s recordings, about how its footage can feel both ordinary and sensationalist.
Gandbhir: It was important to us to let the mundane exist, to let moments play as they did, and to not be too cutty or overdramatic. We wanted people to feel immersed in the neighborhood’s POV. Then, obviously, when you get to the more dramatic scenes, like the night of the incident, there were so many cameras, and we did want incorporate all of them and play into the franticness in the community, the multiple 911 calls that came into the same place over the same issue, including Susan’s call. So, in those scenes we chose to obviously speed it up. We tried to keep the pacing true to the moment that was happening and let the body camera really tell the story.
Filmmaker: So you were letting the innate thriller elements of the body cam do the talking. Were there places where you felt you had to work around or enhance the body camera footage, or the footage of the interrogation?
Gandbhir: There were places where we added score. It has to feel like a movie, a piece of cinema, and a piece of art, because we’re filmmakers. There were places we were very purposeful. [For example] we left up a very long shot at the end. We did put music under it. We wanted folks to feel how with the mundane, there can be a lurking threat you know nothing about. That was a theme throughout the film. When we watched the footage, this could play like you’re in a horror film. We didn’t want to sensationalize in any way, but we are artists. So, at the end, after Susan is taken out of the room, we added a light score and there is a very long shot of the chair. I didn’t want to touch the chair. I stand by that. I will stand by it till I die. I wanted to let that emptiness of the room to sink in. We took the music out at one point and it felt like a mistake. So, we had to sometimes signal that this is an artistic choice. But I love that, because the detective comes back. I don’t want to give too much away, but you know what he does. We wanted the audience to bear with us, and to understand that there was something else coming.
Filmmaker: Did the detective just happen to come back into the room and do that? I too am trying to avoid spoilers.
Gandbhir: That was untouched. We did not edit that. My understanding is they do it for the camera so it is recorded. In case the piece of paper gets lost, or not filed. It’s a tool, like how people write their confessions, which Susan did in some ways. We just let the footage play in places where I wanted it to play.
Filmmaker: Was it always your plan to have the footage of the courtroom verdict play over the end credits?
Gandbhir: Honestly, no. Also, we did not know when the trial would be. Here in the US, trials are often pushed. Originally the trial was scheduled for June of the that year [2024], a year later [after Ajike’s death in June 2023], then it got pushed to August. So, we were unsure and were pretty much set in our minds to work with what we had, to have at the end of the film a card saying the trial or the verdict is pending. But we did feel we had a complete film with the material that existed. Her arrest could have been the end of the film. But having the verdict has honestly added a different dimension, so we were so fortunate.
Filmmaker: Earlier you used the term “systemic.” I wanted to know how you think we teach that. In other words, how do you want this film to end up, beyond distribution in theaters and streaming? Do you want it to play in the community? To be a tool for folks?
Gandbhir: For me, the underlying issue here is really laws like Stand Your Ground and gun access. Susan’s access to a gun greatly harmed a family, a community, but also her own life. There is no coming back from that. She clearly is someone who should not have had access to a gun, but Stand Your Ground laws, which exist in Florida and other states, embolden people to kill people. It’s just a fact. They believe they have this defense, that it will protect them somehow, and it’s weaponized particularly against Black and Brown people. People research it, then do things like this because they think they can set up a situation where they can claim that they were in fear of their life.
Our goal ultimately is that these laws need to be taken down. I would love for this film to be used as a tool to show the dangers of these laws. You should be able to talk to your neighbor. The children in that community talked about how they feared going on her lawn to retrieve a basketball because they thought they would be shot. That is not how you build a community, that is how you destroy a community. If Susan did not have access to a gun, things might have been very different, and Ajike might be with us today. Again, we did not make this to make a social justice issue film. This is the story of something that happened to my family, to particular people who my family loves. So, that is really the story that was important for me to tell, but it is organically linked to this to the Stand Your Ground issue.
Filmmaker: Any final thoughts?
Gandbhir: There’s something about Ajike that I really want everyone to know. She’s really the thing that matters because she’s the person who is lost to us. I didn’t get a chance to know her but her mother tells me that she was a really bright, beautiful, funny person—big personality, a lot of dreams, an excellent mother. Oftentimes her group of friends, my sister-in-law being one of them, and her mother would kind of laugh at her, because she was like, “Just you wait. I’m gonna do this, I’m going to do that.” In one of the last conversations she had with her mother, she said to her, “Just wait, one day the whole world is going to know my name.” That is why I made this film. Ajike wanted a legacy.