‘To this day,” says Geeta Gandbhir, “I’m devastated.” The film-maker is talking about the killing of Ajike “AJ” Owens, a black woman shot dead by her white neighbour in Florida two years ago. Gandbhir first came to the case in a personal capacity, as 35-year-old Owens was a family friend.
But things quickly changed. She and her team worked hard to drum up media attention and pressure law enforcement and government institutions to take action – and hold this neighbour, 60-year-old Susan Lorincz, accountable. They began filming protests and vigils, intending to create short pieces for news outlets.
The law says you only have to prove you feared your life was in danger. This is being weaponised
All this grew and has now resulted in The Perfect Neighbor, a film by Gandbhir, who may well have invented a new subgenre of true crime documentary. By telling the story almost entirely using official – and harrowing – police body camera footage, the 55-year-old director has moved beyond traditional narrative to present an unfiltered and unflinching account of a tightknit community facing a horror in its midst.
It was made possible by Owens’ mother, Pamela Dias, who consented to footage being made public. “I showed Pam the film when it was completed,” says Gandbhir, “and I said, ‘Is this what you want?’ She said, ‘Yes – the world needs to know what happened to my baby.’”
The central themes of the film, which premiered at this year’s Sundance festival and is about to stream on Netflix, include the devastating impact of Florida’s “stand your ground” laws, the weaponisation of race and fear, and the failure of law enforcement to de-escalate a known threat. The shooting was the culmination of a long-running argument between Owens and Lorincz over the former’s children playing in a grassy area near both their houses in Ocala, about 80 miles from Orlando. Owens went to Lorincz’s home after her children complained that she had thrown rollerskates and an umbrella at them, annoyed yet again by their boisterous play.
Lorincz claimed she was acting in self-defence when she fired a single shot from a .380-caliber handgun through her front door, killing Owens. “She dehumanised Ajike over time,” says Gandbhir, “to the point where she was like, ‘The only answer is that I shoot her.’” There were protests in the black community in Ocala when prosecutors took weeks to charge Lorincz with manslaughter – a lesser count than second-degree murder, which carries a potential life sentence. She was eventually sentenced to 25 years in prison for manslaughter.
The project’s trajectory shifted dramatically after one crucial development. Dias’s lawyers used the Freedom of Information Act to compel the police to release all materials pertaining to the case. As well as a huge amount of police body camera footage, this included mobile phone footage, security camera footage, phone calls made by Lorincz, and detective interrogations.
‘A real lack of remorse’ … video provided by the Marion County Sheriff’s Office of Susan Lorincz’s arrest. Photograph: AP
As Gandbhir and her team assessed these files, their immense potential slowly dawned on them. “It was a mess when it came to us,” Gandbhir says. “But I’m a film-maker – it’s my only skill in life. We managed to get through it all. And I realised we could do more with it.” This, she thought, was more than a collection of raw clips – it was a comprehensive, unvarnished archive that could form the basis of a feature-length documentary.
Gandbhir approached Dias and suggested creating a film that would not only honour her daughter’s memory and seek justice, but could also be licensed or sold to provide financial support for the family, and have a broader societal impact. Dias gave her blessing, providing the moral mandate for the project to proceed.
Gandbhir began her career in scripted film, working with directors including Spike Lee and Robert Altman, before switching to documentaries. Her decision to base it almost exclusively on official footage is the defining feature of The Perfect Neighbor, which deliberately eschews traditional elements such as narration, expert interviews and talking heads. The result is immersive and propulsive.
“The key to the best storytelling,” Gandbhir says, “and what you see often in narrative films and scripted films and in the best verité documentaries, is show and don’t tell. If you tell an audience what’s happening, they might question you: who are you and how do you know? Talking heads are a wonderful tool but if you have the ability to show an audience, they will trust you. They will go on the ride with you. We believe audiences are smart and empathetic and can come to their own conclusions. We wanted to embed them in this world.”
A patched bullet hole on the door through which Owens was shot. Photograph: John Raoux/AP
The body camera footage certainly puts viewers right among the action. We watch a group of children, one on a bike, as an officer asks if they’ve been “messing with this lady”. We are with the police as they knock on Lorincz’s door to investigate complaints. We are thrown into chaos on the night Owens dies as her children grieve and emergency services try to revive her.
“It’s institutional footage,” Gandbhir says. “I felt the public would never doubt its authenticity. There was no reporter on the ground with bias. Right now, there is a lot of doubt about the authenticity of things. I believed that people would trust what they were seeing as it unfolded.
“Also, police body camera footage for people of colour like myself, for black and brown folks, oftentimes is seen as a violent tool. The police come into our communities and, afterwards, they use body camera footage to criminalise and dehumanise us, to justify violence they may perpetrate against the community. I wanted to take this footage and flip it on its head.”
The footage includes previous incidents involving Lorincz and her neighbours over two years. “You see the community as they were before the crime, this beautiful little community living together, taking care of each other. You see the children playing in the street and the parents all looking out. There’s a father who comes out and says, ‘I look out for all of them as if they’re mine.’ There’s a neighbour who says, ‘All these kids are mine’ to the cops. The children themselves are confident and precocious and unafraid of the police. They are loved and secure. They have multiple guardians. I wanted to show how one outlier with access to a gun – one dangerous person – could change all of that.”
She believed she was going to get away with it until the very last minute
The police fundamentally failed the community, Gandbhir says. They consistently viewed Lorincz as a “nuisance” rather than a threat, even as her behaviour escalated. She used hate speech and racial slurs, waved a gun and terrorised the children – while repeatedly calling the police. In depicting Lorincz, the film relies on police interrogation footage that reveals a calculated pattern of behaviour, in which she would alternate between two personalities: one aggressive, another positioning herself as the perpetual victim.
Under the pressure of questioning, says Gandbhir, “the case she had built for herself in her mind crumbled”. But rather than labelling Lorincz, the film simply presents her own words and actions. “Most fascinating,” Gandbhir says, “was how she believed she was going to get away with it until the very last minute. There was a real lack of remorse. Her only concern was herself.”
The Perfect Neighbor also shines a light on “stand your ground” laws that, in more than half of US states, remove a person’s legal duty to retreat from a perceived threat before using deadly force. Florida’s version allows individuals to use deadly force if they believe their life is in danger, even if a safe retreat is possible. This led to the 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman, who shot unarmed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Miami Gardens, Florida. Research shows that homicides with white aggressors and black victims are five times more likely to be ruled justifiable.
During her police interrogation, Lorincz admits to having researched the “stand your ground” laws, thereby revealing that her actions were not the spontaneous result of fear but a calculated strategy. “These laws,” Gandbhir says, “are often weaponised by people. You just have to prove that you had a well-founded fear that your life was in danger. This is incredibly dangerous for people of colour, who are often criminalised and seen as a threat.”
‘A violent tool’ … police bodycam footage in The Perfect Neighbor. Photograph: Courtesy of Netflix
The story of Owens and Lorincz is also the story of America today, in all its seething rage and fear; a place of racial division and gun violence. But Gandbhir found grounds for hope. “This film holds a mirror up to society. You see it in Susan’s behaviour, in her weaponising the police and dehumanising the community and her neighbours. She choses to ‘adultify’ and criminalise the children, most of them under 12, playing in a yard near her house that they had permission to be in.
“There are many Susans – but there are also many people like the neighbours. This shows you the best of America because it shows you a diverse, multiracial community living together, loving each other, taking care of each other’s kids.
“The night that Ajike was killed, you see obviously the horror, but you also see that community spring into action. They put their lives in danger. They went out on to the lawn and surrounded Ajike. Susan was still in the house with a gun. They didn’t know how trigger-happy she was. They didn’t know what she was going to do. They went and immediately took the children and held them.
“That is the best of America. That is what I believe in and what we hope people walk away with – realising that communities like that need to be protected. We must protect them from the Susans of the world.”
The Perfect Neighbor opens in UK cinemas on 10 October and streams on Netflix from 17 October
