The PERFECT NEIGHBOR INTERVIEW

The New Black Film Collective recently welcomed filmmaker Geeta Gandbhir and activist Pamela Dias to London, for an intimate conversation about their Netflix documentary, The Perfect Neighbor. Gandbhir, who directed the film, is a longtime family friend of Dias, whose daughter, Ajike “AJ” Owens, was tragically killed in the incident that inspired the documentary.

The powerful, and deeply emotional film has been sparking conversations about racial violence, justice, and the meaning of community since its world premiere at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the U.S. Documentary Directing Award. The Perfect Neighbor takes audiences inside not just a tragedy, but the heartbeat of a typical American neighbourhood - its tensions, fears, and shared humanity.

TNBFC's Jeff Igbokwe sat down with Gandbhir and Dias to speak about the significance of community, grief, and the ongoing fight for change that has followed.

TNBFC: First of all, it’s good to have you guys here. What brings you guys to London today?

Gandbhir: So, we’re here with the film, The Perfect Neighbor, and we are doing some screenings and meeting with folks like you, just before the rollout, before it comes out on Netflix.

TNBFC: The Perfect Neighbor takes us inside not just a tragedy, but the fabric of an American neighbourhood. We get to explore the tensions, the fears, and the humanity of those living in the community. Before we go deeper, I want to hear from you both. When you think about the film, what do you hope audiences take away with them once they see it? Whether that’s from the perspective of telling the story as a filmmaker or living through the experiences as a mother?

Dias: Okay. So as a mother, obviously I see, and I’m sure the world sees, the tragedy, the grief, the pain, that not only my family, the children experienced, but also the community within the neighbourhood. And that also extends out to the community as a whole, and the world. I want them to walk away not just with empathy for our family or for the tragedy that has occurred, but as an opportunity to get involved, and to make real changes. Not to become immune. Because this has happened before, racial violence. It continues to happen, and it will happen again and again, unfortunately. But not to say, “wow, this is sad”. Or “once again we have a person of colour affected or killed due to gun violence”, but to really walk away with a sense of urgency that they need to get involved, make their voices heard, and make real changes, whether it’s to Stand-Your-Ground laws, or the Castle Doctrine that’s in many of the states. Get involved, and make your voices known and heard, and make real change to our society that we live in.

Gandbhir: As a filmmaker, we see film, I see film, as a tool to entertain, to take people… to help people and audiences experience worlds that are not their own. It can be a tool for change. The hope for this is that people will walk away demanding better for themselves and their communities, and with the realisation that this could be them, right? This was a beautiful tight knit community you see in the footage. One of the things we really wanted to showcase and was important to us in the making of this film, is the community. It’s this diverse, beautiful community, living together, raising children together, there’s a safety net. The social fabric of it created a safety net for the children you see in the footage, and again we showcase it, the children playing in the street. The neighbours saying things like, “oh these children are all mine”, or the father comes out and says, “I look out for all these kids like my own”, and the kids are incredibly secure. They are not fearful of the police. They walk up to them and say things like, “we’re eleven!”. And when he comments on them being kids, they said, “but we are kids, DUH!”. They’re very confident, they’re very precocious, they’re loved. And we want people to see how one outlier can put an end to that, can cause so much harm. We crafted the film trusting our audience to go on the journey with us. We didn’t want to make a true crime procedure. We wanted to make something that elevated the story, to do justice to Ajike’s legacy, and honour this community. So those are all the things we wanted to achieve.

TNBFC: You did structure The Perfect Neighbor almost entirely using police bodycam footage, 911 calls, and recorded interactions with law enforcement. What were the greatest risks and rewards, because you probably had to go through hundreds of hours of bodycam footage.

TNBFC: It was about 30 hours of footage, but this was a really hard film to make. It was grief work for us in many ways, and we did it only with Pam’s blessing. When I realised there was two years’ worth of footage, as you said, it was all the things you mentioned, but needing audio recordings of calls, audio recordings of detective interviews, ring camera footage. There was even cell phone footage. Then all the body camera footage of all the numerous calls. And everything was completely out of order. It didn’t come to us synchronised or organised in any way, we had to do, almost the detective work. The investigative detective work of piecing together which video went with which audio, and which police officer belonged to which camera, or vice versa. And as you see, the police do not always have their body cameras on. They turn them off and on, and we tried to establish that in the film. We wanted to make sure people understood what they were looking at, that one person’s camera would be off, one would be on. So, it was a hard film to make, and to figure out the chronology. But it was incredibly important for us to use that footage because it’s undeniable. Now police body camera footage is usually, for us, Black and brown folks, a tool of surveillance, and it’s a violent, invasive tool that’s used to criminalise us, right. The police use it in their defence. For this, we wanted to subvert that, because what you have with the two years prior, is the community. You see them as they were before. You never see that when it comes to a crime. You usually have footage from the day of, or maybe the day before. But with this, you have two years that leads up, where we get to know this community, and see them living together, the kids playing in the streets, how close they all were. How they took care of each other. We wanted the audience to feel embedded, and to go on a journey with them. And we trust them. We trust our audience. Audiences are smart, they are empathetic, and we know they will, on this ride, be able to understand what the community went through. We also wanted it to feel like a thriller, because we know to hold an audience’s attention in this time period, you have to be able to grasp them. We wanted them to feel what the community went through, the horror of it all, so that’s why the police body camera footage became the predominant means of telling the story.

TNBFC: I watch a lot of true crime, and I had actually heard about the case a couple of months ago because I had seen it on YouTube. I feel like in a lot of high-profile true crime stories, the victims, and the families of the victims sometimes get pushed to the side or commodified, whereas the killer or the crime becomes the spectacle. Pamela, how have you viewed The Perfect Neighbor as a tool for keeping your daughters’ identity, worth, and legacy as the main focus rather than allowing her to become a casefile?

DIAS: The Perfect Neighbor, showcases my daughter as her true authentic self, as a mother. It captures her, and even her children, as they were, and how she raised them to be respectful. Geeta and her team were the perfect people to tell Ajike’s story. I knew that it would be told with integrity and honesty. Also, the film, it goes beyond just showing Ajike, it shows the community at large, as Geeta pointed out, with how they were before. You see the dynamics of the family and the children. Its real and its honest. The film is also a mechanism to carry on her legacy. Ajike had big, big, big dreams. She was very young, she was a single mum, and the sole provider for her family and household. We spoke all the time, and one of the things, because she had such an entrepreneurial spirit and wanted to better her life for her children, she tossed around ideas of starting a business. And one of our latter conversations was, she stated, “The world is going to know my name”. As a mum, I was just like, “okay, sure thing”, and she emphatically repeated, “the world is going to know my name!”. The Perfect Neighbor is the mechanism in which the world does know her name. it gives her life, it gives her a voice, and it gives it with truth and honesty. Theres no doubt that this film will impact the world at large. It already has. One of the things that we have birthed is what’s called the Standing In The Gap Fund, which also further reserves and honours Ajike’s legacy. Myself, along with Geeta’s family member Takema Robinson, we co-founded the Standing In The Gap Fund, because we found that when families are affected by racial violence and gun violence, they’re not in the space to really come together in terms of what they need. I was oblivious, I was lost and in pain. I didn’t even realise that at the time we were receiving death threats. The Standing In The Gap Fund is meant to do just that, stand in the gap for families, so we support them financially, in terms of burial cost, mental health services…

Gandbhir: Legal.

Dias: Legal, yes thank you. We even had to get security. So, we cover things of that nature. So, in tangent, The Perfect Neighbor and the Standing In The Gap Fund, it does a beautiful job of honouring Ajike’s legacy.

Gandbhir: So Ajike was a family friend, so that’s how this film came to me. It should have never been made, this is a film that shouldn’t exist, and I would so much prefer that Ajike was with us today. But I believe, as Pam does, that Ajike would have wanted this. She would not have wanted us to be at home, crying all the time. She would have wanted us to be out in the world, making sure people say her name. So that’s what this is about.

TNBFC: I do feel like this film can be seen as a microcosm for American society today. When I viewed it, I interpreted it as showing how one Florida neighbourhood reflects larger contemporary issues of fear, polarisation, distrust…

Gandbhir: 100%.

TNBFC: In today’s climate of rising gun violence and polarisation, how did you balance making the story feel rooted in Ajike’s local community, while also resonating with audiences outside of America?

Gandbhir: So, I think for us, we believe, I believe. I come from a narrative film background, originally, I started in narrative film with Spike Lee. The first films that I worked on were with him, and he’s sort of been a mentor along with Sam Pollard. And the rule of thumb that I learned was show and not tell. Theres a technique in filmmaking called ‘show and not tell’ where if you tell an audience what’s happening, you lose them. People don’t like to be told. But if you show them, they will believe it. That is how we chose to make this film. This could be anywhere in the world. The universal thing is that we all live in a neighbourhood, we all have neighbours, we all live in a community of some sort, and disputes can arise. We can all relate to that. And how we show up in that small community, that small community is always a microcosm of how we show up in the world, right? How we treat our neighbours is how we show up in the world, as you can see in the film, this community was a loving, beautiful, closely, you know. Tight-knit, close community taking care of each other, and Susan the outlier, that one person can come in and destroy that by having access to a gun. She was able to use violence, and the ripple effect was tremendous in the community. It is forever traumatised. I think that what we see too is these laws, like Stand Your Ground, they manufacture fear. They teach us to be afraid of our neighbours, and that they way to solve a dispute with a neighbour is with a gun. This is a tool used by authoritarian governments to polarize us, to make us fear each other, so they can step in, and take control, and that paves the pathway for much greater atrocities. If you can use a gun against your neighbour, what else are you capable of? Someone who you share a community with. What else could you do? What else could you accept? What else could you tolerate? Perhaps war? Perhaps genocide? This is what it is. These laws are in place to basically make us numb. And you see that in Susan, again, was a person who weaponised the police against the community around her without a thought, again and again calling them. That is incredibly dangerous. And people often ask “well, why didn’t the community call the police on Susan?" well, why would they? The police are an invading threat to them. Oftentimes, the dynamic between the police and people of colour in the US is one that is of terror. So, you see in this again, I think this is a microcosm, and it was really important to us that the audience be embedded in that and feel what the community went through. I think an example is Adolescenceon Netflix, similarly, where you’re just embedded with this family, and with the families, and it unfolds in ways that are unexpected. That’s what happened. We were also showing the truth, that’s what happened.

TNBFC: Has the film been dismissed by certain groups?

Gandbhir: No. But we’ve been on a film festival circuit, but it will be on Netflix, I’m sure there might be people. We’re not concerned about that. We are just concerned about Ajike’s legacy and making this change.

 TNBFC: Thank you, guys, so much.

 Gandbhir: Thank you so much. So nice to meet you.

 Dias: Thank you.

The Perfect Neighbor was released on Netflix on 17th October 2025.