AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.

We turn now to a conversation with Geeta Gandbhir. She’s an Emmy-winning, acclaimed Indian American documentary filmmaker, director, producer and editor, recently made history as the first woman to receive Academy Award nominations for both Best Documentary Feature and Best Documentary Short in the same year.

The short documentary, The Devil Is Busy, chronicles a day on the frontlines in the battle for reproductive rights at a women’s healthcare clinic in Atlanta, Georgia. It is streaming on HBO Max.

Her feature documentary, The Perfect Neighbor, is nominated for Best Documentary Feature, available on Netflix. The film looks at the case of Ajike Owens, a 35-year-old Black mother of four, fatally shot in 2023 by her white neighbor, Susan Lorincz, raising further scrutiny of Florida’s so-called Stand Your Ground law, which Lorincz researched before shooting A.J. Owens. Lorincz is presently serving 25 years in prison after a jury convicted her of manslaughter. The film is constructed almost entirely from police bodycam footage as police are called repeatedly to the neighborhood in the lead-up to the shooting. This is a trailer for The Perfect Neighbor.

911 DISPATCHER: 911. What’s the address of the emergency?

SUSAN LORINCZ: I’m having problems with the neighbor’s children.

OFFICER 1: Hello. Sheriff’s Office. Were any of you guys over here messing with this lady?

CHILD 1: No, no. We were playing football.

OFFICER 2: Sheriff’s Office.

SUSAN LORINCZ: I called because the kids from across the street, they shouldn’t be screaming and running around.

OFFICER 2: OK.

AJIKE OWENS: All the kids like to play. She moves in. They can’t walk or even throw their football over there.

911 DISPATCHER: 911. What is the address of the emergency?

SUSAN LORINCZ: There are several kids out there right now screaming and yelling.

NEIGHBOR 1: Nine times out of 10, that lady over there probably called.

OFFICER 3: Oh, I know.

NEIGHBOR 1: It’s like, they’re kids.

CHILD 2: She thinks we’re trying to steal her truck.

OFFICER 3: You even know how to drive?

CHILD 3: We’re 11!

SUSAN LORINCZ: It clearly says “no trespassing,” and they’re always walking their dog.

OFFICER 4: There doesn’t need to be a call for service every time there are kids playing in the yard.

NEIGHBOR 2: She’s always messing with people’s kids.

OFFICER 5: Sheriff’s Office!

SUSAN LORINCZ: One minute!

911 DISPATCHER: 911. What is the address of the emergency?

NEIGHBOR 3: My neighbor has been screaming outside.

NEIGHBOR 4: She started banging on her door.

NEIGHBOR 5: Pounding on it. “Let me in.” And then… Bang!

NEIGHBOR 6: Over here! Right here! Right here! Right here!

SUSAN LORINCZ: I’m peaceful. I’m quiet. I don’t bug anybody.

OFFICER 6: Come outside with your hands up!

SUSAN LORINCZ: You barely ever see me. I’m like the perfect neighbor.

AMY GOODMAN: The trailer for The Perfect Neighbor.

I sat down with the film’s director, Geeta Gandbhir. I started by asking her how she came to this project.

GEETA GANDBHIR: This is a project that myself and my team at Message Pictures, we didn’t go looking for it. It came to us. And the reason that it did was because Ajike Owens was a friend of my family. She was very close to some family that I have living in Florida.

And so, on the night that she was murdered, we got a distress call from my family, and we immediately sprung into action. And when I say “we,” I mean myself, my husband, and who’s also a producer on the film, Nikon Kwantu, and Message Pictures, my team, Alisa Payne and Sam Pollard. And we were immediately on the ground trying to support the family. And we became media liaisons for them, trying to get media — trying to get news coverage of the case, because we know without news coverage, unfortunately, gun violence is so common that cases like Ajike’s can get swept under the rug. So, that’s how we got involved.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, before Susan Lorincz kills Ajike, also known as “A.J.,” I want to go to several clips from the film of witnesses describing an incident with her. This is an incident with Susan Lorincz, the white woman who killed A.J., in which Susan waves a gun at the children in the neighborhood.

CHILD 1: Another thing that happened that my friend told — my friend me that lady over there showed the kids that she had a gun.

CHILD 2: We were just playing over there, and then she was waving her gun. And Isaac and all them were, like, “Run!” And we were hiding behind this car right here.

CHILD 3: And every time the basketball would go up there, I would be on my Ps and Qs, like, because I ain’t trying to get shot just for going up on her driveway.

CHILD 1: Maybe like two days before that.

OFFICER: About two days before —

CHILD 1: Yeah.

OFFICER: — she showed this gun?

CHILD 1: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: Witnesses repeatedly describe Susan Lorincz’s racist and aggressive behavior toward the predominantly Black children living in the neighborhood, including referring to them as “slaves.” This is another clip from The Perfect Neighbor.

NEIGHBOR 1: Susan, she would come out and scream. And the language around these little kids.

OFFICER 1: That Susan would use?

NEIGHBOR 1: Yeah. Oh.

OFFICER 2: Describe to me what she was saying.

CHILD 1: The F-word, the B-word.

OFFICER 2: B-word and the F-word.

NEIGHBOR 2: She called them slaves. She told them that the field that they were on wasn’t the Underground Railroad.

OFFICER 3: You guys chasing a dog around here?

CHILD 2: Chasing a dog? What color is it?

OFFICER 3: I don’t know.

CHILD 2: What color is it?

OFFICER 3: You guys chasing a dog or trying to put a dog into a car or something?

CHILD 3: No. The Karen called.

CHILD 4: The Karen called.

CHILD 5: Yeah, she’s saying —

CHILD 3: I don’t know why she keeps trying to waste her time.

CHILD 2: She gets on — she just — we’re — the kids are just playing around here, right?

CHILD 6: Excuse me. He wants to talk to you.

CHILD 2: She came out and started talking smack.

CHILD 4: And she flipped me off.

CHILD 7: She flipped him off because this is public space right there.

OFFICER 3: OK. I’m going to go talk to her.

CHILD 8: Is she going to yell at us?

CHILD 3: She had — she asks — because every time I walk past, she thinks we’re trying to steal her truck, or by her truck.

CHILD 8: We’re not even — 

OFFICER 3: How old are you?

CHILD 8: We’re 11!

OFFICER 3: OK, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: OK. So, that’s another clip from The Perfect Neighbor. And these are kids who are being talked to by police officers. Geeta, if you could explain the footage that you used?

GEETA GANDBHIR: Sure. So, essentially, about two months after Ajike was murdered, we received the body-camera footage, which you see in these clips. The film is about 95% police evidence. We received it from the family lawyers, Benjamin Crump and Anthony Thomas. And they asked us to go through it to see if there was anything we could use for the media. And I used to be an editor. I strung it out. And we saw it was about 30 hours of material.

And what was so astonishing about it was that it went back two years, prior to the crime, and you never see this. In this footage, we got to see this beautiful, multiracial, intergenerational community as they were before, before this terrible crime occurred. And we get to see them living together, loving each other, raising kids together, kind of the best of us, the best of our society, a bit of the American dream, and how Susan, who was one outlier with a gun, used manufactured fear, weaponized racism and had access to guns. Again, the gun laws in Florida allow you to buy a weapon like a toaster oven or a microwave. And then also we see how Stand Your Ground laws came into play, and the intersection of all those things led to this terrible crime.

AMY GOODMAN: This is more than a decade after George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin.

GEETA GANDBHIR: Yes, yes, yes. And we have — so, we have the precedent of that in Florida. And so, for us and the family, we were deeply concerned that there would be no justice for Ajike. So, Stand Your Ground exists in about 38 states in some shape, form or fashion, and the tenets are different state by state. But in Florida, the way that the law works is that you can — as long as you are anywhere lawfully — you don’t have to be in your home, but anywhere lawfully — you can use deadly force to defend yourself against a perceived threat without the duty to retreat. So, imagine how biases play into that, because a threat can be perceived. So, this is what exists in Florida. And again, it’s an incredibly dangerous law, and there is no way that racism is not a factor.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the through-line from your Oscar-nominated documentary short, The Devil Is Busy, which we’re going to talk about in a moment, to The Perfect Neighbor, and also why you chose that title, The Perfect Neighbor?

GEETA GANDBHIR: Sure. So I’ll start with the title. So, I believe The Perfect Neighbor holds a mirror up to our society. It speaks to all the ills that are coming, mostly from the top down, frankly, that are being used to divide us and to polarize us. Again, I mentioned manufactured fear, weaponized racism. We are being told to fear our neighbors. And that is obviously in service of then our neighbors being kidnapped and, you know, perhaps trafficked into concentration camps, in my opinion. It’s a way of dividing us so that we do not fight back against encroaching authoritarianism. So, for me, it — Susan describes herself as “the perfect neighbor.” She says, “I’m quiet. You never see me. I don’t do anything.” And I think there’s irony in that, because the perfect neighbor, I believe, is what you see in that community of neighbors who care for each other, who are visible, who speak up and who, again, are in close solidarity with each other. And I think when we think about what we’re going through today in our society, I want people to think about being what a perfect neighbor actually is. Is it the people in Minneapolis who are defending their neighbors, who are in the streets, who are actually risking their lives and, in some cases, dying? I think that might be the case. So I would like people to think about that and hopefully walk away wanting to be upstanders.

And then, the through-line to The Devil Is Busy, so, that film, this short, made with Soledad O’Brien, Rose Arce and my amazing co-directors, my best friend from college, Christalyn Hampton, also a family film, we wanted to make a film about the fall of Roe v. Wade at the federal level, the Dobbs decision, and the impact. And this clinic in Georgia, which is run predominantly by women of color, felt like an incredible vehicle into that world. The film is representative of a day in the life. And the security guard, Tracii, who is on the frontlines, is deeply religious, as religious as the men who are protesting outside. But she believes that women’s reproductive freedom is still a fundamental right.

AMY GOODMAN: The filmmaker Geeta Gandbhir. She’s made history as the first woman to receive Academy Award nominations for both Best Documentary Feature, for The Perfect Neighbor, and Best Documentary Short, for The Devil Is Busy, in the same year. To see our full interview with Geeta Gandbhir, go to democracynow.org.