Image Conscious:
An Interview with Geeta Gandbhir
By Robert Daniels
The best thriller of 2025 isn’t fiction. Geeta Gandbhir’s subversive and harrowing documentary The Perfect Neighbor is a riveting work whose oblique lens grants the viewer a clarifying look at race in America. The film begins with a hurried 911 call from June 2, 2023, which reported Susan Lorincz’s fatal shooting of Ajike “AJ” Shantrell Owens. From the vantage point of a police dashcam, we speed both down dark roads toward the crime scene and back to the beginning of the story.
Through the Freedom of Information Act, Gandbhir obtained police bodycam videos whose recordings were instigated by the many times Lorincz, Owens’s bigoted white neighbor, called the police to report Owens and her four young children for assault and trespassing. Through the bevy of police visits, which started on February 25, 2022, when Lorincz charged Owens with throwing a lawn sign at her, we witness two truths: Lorincz is a virulent racist and the police coddled her. But unlike most true crime documentaries, this critique of Florida’s Stand Your Ground law isn’t really about the killer.
This is a humanizing work. While police bodycam videos have haunted our collective memory, often providing the final images of Black lives extinguished under the weight of an authoritarian boot, here they chronicle the beauty of this Ocala community. We witness children of color playing football together; parents looking out for one another’s families; Owens’s boundless love for her kids. These empathetic glimpses into this community’s quotidian life create the foreboding anxiety that hate will erase the good in this neighborhood. I spoke with Gandbhir over Zoom during the New York Film Festival about retooling bodycam images, finding a thriller tone, and capturing a family in mourning.
Reverse Shot: I love your previous film Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power, which not only captured the legacy and work of Civil Rights activists but also, through its archival footage, was deeply immersive. With its bodycam footage The Perfect Neighbor is also incredibly immersive. How do you guide viewers through charged political stories?
Geeta Gandbhir: I'm really interested in making immersive stories and giving people as visceral an experience as possible. That was true in Lowndes County with the archive that we found. I really wanted people to feel that they were embedded, but also I’m interested in stories that have an unexpected angle, stories that are a Trojan horse for a greater message. I think that's how you connect with people. For example, I did a short years ago called A Conversation with My Black Son, and it was about deciding when, as parents of Black children, we should explain to them who the police are. It was a topic that I realized a lot of my white colleagues knew nothing about at that time.
But generally, I think we all have universal hopes and dreams and wants, and it’s all about how you connect to an audience. How do you make people take the same emotional journey with you and come to the same emotional conclusion without beating them on the head? I come from a narrative background, so all of that is of interest to me.
RS: I found it so overwhelming to see the existence of these subjects through the distorted lens of the bodycam, which is usually used in such a dehumanizing way.
GG: There's a couple of films I think about like Paranormal Activity, which was completely immersive, or even Cloverfield and The Blair Witch Project. Those were the most prominent films that approached the idea of the first-person camera. So, we have seen POV before, it has been used, but I don't think ever so much in a documentary. With this film, we initially got involved because Ajike was a family friend. My team and I were originally the media team for the family in the sense of just trying to keep this story alive in the news. The body camera footage came to us through the lawyers of Pamela Dia, Ajike’s mother. That's when I realized how much there was, so I didn’t have to go back and interview the community and retraumatize them. That just seemed wrong. I didn't want to do that to them and make them relive it. With the footage it felt like we had everything we needed.
Now, I do want to say, I’m highly aware that police body camera footage is a tool of the state. It’s a tool of violence against people of color. It’s used to dehumanize us; it’s used to criminalize us; it’s used to surveil us; it’s used to justify bad police behavior when it comes to invading our communities. I was able to subvert the use of body camera footage because the police were called so often to that neighborhood, they ended up documenting this beautiful little community that was living together harmoniously. The footage shows you the truth of what the community was prior. And we usually never get to see that. We always see the aftermath of something happening within our communities. We always see the grieving family, and we see the funeral. It’s almost to the point where we’ve become numb to it. There's a shooting every week and now we have a government that’s violent towards us. It was critical to see the community as they were before.
RS: I’m wondering in what way that personal connection to the family made combing through this footage—particularly, the many times when the police didn’t intervene with Susan—emotionally affected you.
GG: I was concerned about being inured, but I also had an incredible editor, Viridiana Lieberman, and I also had my team to help bring clarity and perspective. Still, once we committed to the body camera footage, we were determined to live in it. We wanted to build and recreate the world that this community existed in, which you couldn't do otherwise. So, it was challenging at times, and there were moments I doubted it. My editor Viri was the one who was like: No, we said we were going to do this. We're not putting in a talking head. I also believe the audience is smart. I believe they can, if you give them the opportunity, go along on the journey with you. They will trust you. That’s what happened with this film. I really made it as a piece of art, and I was also concerned with using the material in the most cinematic way possible in a voice that honored the community and its legacy.
RS: You mentioned that you didn’t want to retraumatize the community by conducting interviews. Toward the end of the film, Owens’s son Izzy speaks off camera. Was that audio part of an interview or something else?
GG: When we were on the ground immediately after the shooting, we captured some vigils, and we shot the funeral, and there were other things happening that we shot. So, some of the footage in the film is ours. We shot the interstitials that have detective interviews under them. We had drone footage and footage of the protests. We were trying to shoot the organizing because Taima Robinson, who is my relative, but also an executive producer, is an organizer. And we were initially filming it to share it with the news. But that piece of audio was from the funeral.
RS: The score for much of the film is subtle until Owens is shot, and then I noticed that the synth seemingly pulsated to the flashing of the police lights. Could you talk about your approach to the score?
GG: I have an incredible sound team. Laura Heinzinger and her partner Filipe Messeder, worked together on this. Laura was my composer on a couple other projects as well and we wanted the music for this to be tonal and ambient because we made this film to make people uncomfortable. We wanted people to be on the edge of their seats. And so Laura's score was an additive piece that made people feel like something was off, causing an underlying stress. And then obviously on the night of the shooting there were so many police on the scene and there was so much chaos. There were so many 911 calls, and we had to syncall of that material up and figure out where it began and ended and whose camera was connected to who. The score slows down once Ajike has left in the ambulance and the father has to talk to the kids. We really slowed it down to let it linger. We want people to feel what this family went through.
RS: You were able to get Susan’s iPhone footage. Why did you want to switch to her perspective?
GG: Susan obviously was filming the kids that night and she filmed them playing football. Also, her phone was upside down and you could even hear her breathing. Her footage reflected her becoming more unhinged, more paranoid and aggressive, so I wanted the sense of her lurking. And you see the kids, they're just playing football. The neighbor who owns that land, he's the one the kids would always play football with. He had his children too, who were the same age as the other kids. So what she was filming was so innocuous, but she was threatening, nonetheless. We wanted to show how deep her paranoia went.
RS: When you show the aftermath of Owens’s murder, we see the moment the news of her death is broken to her children. What was the thought process behind openly sharing that grief?
GG: We were conscious that we were showing raw grief on screen and it’s heartbreaking. You hear Pam on the phone with the father, and she’s just hysterically crying into the phone. But I had conversations with Pam about it, and I was like, “Some of this footage can be painful. What do you want to do?” She takes a lot of strength from Mamie Till, Emmett Till's mother, as an inspiration. Till had an open casket funeral and demanded the press come and take pictures because she wanted the world to know what happened to her baby. It's the same. Pam feels like she wants the world to know what happened to her baby. So we are asking the audience to bear witness, and by bearing witness we can create a groundswell around things. I think about George Floyd. If we hadn’t seen that video, there wouldn’t have been a global outcry and global protests around the issue. So, if we leave these things in the dark and don't bear witness to them, they'll continue. And while asking the audience to go for that ride, maybe we feel like we're asking for a lot, but it takes all of us to make this world a better and safer place.
RS: I always struggle with whether film can affect actual change. Do you think it can?
GG: We'll find out. I don't have any other skills. What do you want from me? [Laughs] But also, I worked on a film called The Sentence years ago with Rudy Valdez, and it did impact a change in the girlfriend laws [mandatory minimum 15-year sentence for girlfriends who didn’t report the crime of their spouse] in Michigan. There was a lot of push behind that, and the film was part of overturning those laws. So, I'm always hopeful.