Imagine a new neighbor moving in and immediately objecting to your kids playing on open land down the block where they’ve always played – land that the neighbor doesn’t even own. Then imagine that the neighbor targets and insults your kids and constantly calls the police on them and you. And that the one day the neighbor crosses a line that alters the world of your children forever.
That’s what director-producer Geeta Gandbhir depicts in “The Perfect Neighbor,” her chilling, ripped-from-the-headlines documentary that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on Friday. The setting is Ocala, Florida, with the main conflict involving Ajike Owens, a Black mother of four, and Susan Lorincz, a single, older white woman. Using police bodycam footage almost exclusively, Gandbhir, an award-winning editor prior to turning her focus to directing, puts a magnifying glass on the conflict from its inception. She invites viewers to judge the case for themselves.
What Gandbhir’s lens reveals is disturbing and can even be triggering if you identify with Owens. When Lorincz moved into the neighborhood in North Central Florida, she persistently called the police with complaints that almost immediately crossed into the absurd. Under the veil of neutrality and impartiality, the cops acknowledged Lorincz’s many complaints but waved them off. The film shows them advising Owens, her kids and others in the neighborhood to tread lightly around Lorincz, essentially putting the onus of Lorincz’s bad behavior on her victims.
The entire neighborhood calls out Lorincz as the bad actor and aggressor, but the police give her pass after pass. They indulge her sense of entitlement at the expense of her neighbors, who are largely Black people and white women with bi-racial children. But the cops brush off Lorincz using racial epithets on the kids, many of kindergarten and early elementary school age.
Like many who are Black and from other marginalized groups, Owens did not call the police herself – and with good reason, since law enforcement’s long history with the Black community has not been one of protection. Instead, the police have more often been weaponized against Black people. Michael Brown’s 2014 death involving police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri is one of the main catalysts for police wearing body cameras. And having public access to that footage is vital to “The Perfect Neighbor,” especially as Florida’s controversial “stand your ground” law comes into play once again in all its ugliness.
“The Perfect Neighbor” doesn’t hide from systemic racism, white fragility, police bias and other ills of our society. Pulling back society’s blinders and exposing this kind of injustice is in the DNA of Gandbhir, who has worked on Peabody- and Emmy-winning works like the HBO documentary “If God Is Willing and the Creek Don’t Rise,” the PBS series “Asian Americans” and the short documentary “Through Our Eyes: Apart.”
Joining forces with executive producer Soledad O’Brien and Park Pictures and co-founder Sam Bisbee, who has premiered more than a dozen films at Sundance, has given “The Perfect Neighbor” industry eyes other efforts may struggle to find. But it’s the quality and transparency in which “The Perfect Neighbor” was made, along with the urgency and timeliness of its subject matter, that will make it difficult for viewers to turn their backs on Ajike Owens and her children. The film has the ability to chip away at any lingering delusions that our policing is just and colorblind.
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