Sometimes the thriller The most sordid ones appear in the courtyard of a house. Sometimes the most relevant and political stories can arise from a neighborhood dispute. Director Geeta Gandbhir, in fact, arrived at the crime of the documentary The perfect neighbor when her sister-in-law asked her for a favor: to help bring justice for Ajika Owens, a friend from Florida murdered by her neighbor. He hadn’t even thought about turning the story into a movie, but little by little he discovered that this story contained a debate about outdated laws that would help him talk about racism, access to guns, lack of legal protection and even the concept of fear. All from the point of view of two neighbors.
Because the case, and also the film now available on Netflix, begins in the most typical way: a white neighbor, Susan Lorincz, has been calling the police for months to complain about African-American children playing near her front door. The officers, however, are not trained to do anything, as the legal boundaries of the construction site are unclear. It was a classic case of accusations of some against those of others. It didn’t look like anyone was breaking the law. Fortunately for the documentary maker, the police, unable to resolve the situation, had recorded the entire story of the collision with chest cameras. This gave Gandbhir, who grew up as an assistant editor on Spike Lee’s films, unique material to construct a true story told with narrative pace and presented almost as “a thrillera horror film”, he tells EL PAÍS in a videoconference.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNp85HGJtoo much
“Putting it all together was my grieving process and a real investigation. I started the project because I wanted to understand the case. It seemed impossible to me that someone would take a gun and kill over such a trivial dispute, in which the victim had not even entered the house. How did we get here? We wanted to tell the point of view of everyone present in 360 degrees and, at the same time, motivate the viewer to be better neighbors, not to transfer the social polarization that pitted us against each other from high places to our routine”, explains the director, who discovered her main source in the 30 hours of first-person crime material.
The police images were a treasure with which to send another message, although it would not have been easy to transform it into an hour and a half of footage: “This view from the chest of the policeman makes you present in the situation, and it is also objective, that’s what happened. The POV (English acronym for point of view) is perfect in an era when the veracity of everything is questioned. You accompany them to see how everything is growing. But, also, in the United States police cameras are regularly used as violent weapon of the state to monitor and criminalize people of color and vulnerable communities. We wanted to redefine its use and make it serve to capture a small family community, details of normality that are not usually seen around a crime.”
A normality that has come to terms with injustices. His fear at the beginning of the film was that the assailant would be freed by taking advantage of the Florida law that says you can kill in self-defense if you can justify that the shooter feared for his life: “The idea of fear is used as a manufactured weapon. It serves to divide us.” In this case, the supposed fear confronts a white woman with a neighborhood of African-American families. “Living in a racist society, the law is used as a weapon against people of color. It becomes an abstract justification that is impossible to prove for people who often want to commit a crime or who commit a crime by mistake. It encourages them to commit it because they have that self-defense as protection.” The protagonist of The perfect neighborthen 58 years old, he couldn’t justify it and was sentenced to 25 years in prison.
But Gandbhir doesn’t even blame Susan for the murder, but sees the case as a systemic, social and political problem: “I wanted the audience to realize how insecure the population is in the face of these laws and in the face of lax gun control. Susan (who the film suggests had mental health problems) should never have had a gun. And this ruined a community, a family and her own life. She also had no protection, and I wanted to understand whether she had any protection or not.” premeditation. The documentary at the same time shows the police from a gentle perspective, and not with the violence that is usual in these works on racial issues, but, says Gandbhir, even so, “they failed completely. They did not protect anyone because they were not trained to do so, nor were there mediators or social workers to avoid the worst possible end.”
With all the elements on the table, the filmmaker is now very grateful for the debate that her work has sparked on the Internet: “I trust that the audience is intelligent. I wanted to show all the points of view, the victims, Susan, the police… and let the audience decide. I think that art can push for a change of opinion more than other sources of information. And even if we don’t change our minds, I want to sow that spark of doubt”, explains the director, who recognizes that the first person she showed it to was her mother of the victim, “the bravest woman in the world”. He made the documentary for her. And he just wanted the story to be known.
Gandbhir argues, in fact, that too many documentaries forget to humanize the victim. This is why he doesn’t agree with those who define his documentary as a true crime more in the wave of crimes on the platforms streaming: “Even if there are some very well made ones, too many times they are pure sensationalism. This is an independent film with which we wanted to look for more meaning, where the important thing is injustice. Maybe what we need to do is redefine the term true crime”.
To spark this conversation, the Sundance Festival-winning director is particularly grateful for Netflix’s global reach: “We were a film made with very little money, without celebrities and about a crime without sensationalism. And it was necessary to reach another kind of audience, because that’s how you get political changes and social movements. We didn’t want to convince the parish.”
After releasing him, Gandbhir remains optimistic. Otherwise she surely wouldn’t have even made the effort to work on this film: “Everything can be changed. It depends on who we elect. The important thing is that people have the motivation to demand change and demand better gun control. But in some states there are changes. We can’t bury ourselves in despair. I’m from New York and we just saw that change can happen,” explains this daughter of an Indian immigrant immediately after the victory of Zohran Mamdani, the new mayor of her city. Because, have faith, that from small things we can change the world.
