The truth is always more powerful than fiction. The Perfect Neighbor team made up of director Geeta Gandbhir and producers Alisa Payne, Nikon Kwantu and Sam Bisbee took home the award for Best Documentary at the 2026 Independent Spirit Awards on Sunday.
Speaking backstage to the press, Gandbhir followed up her rousing political speech onstage, to talk more about documented injustices as it pertains to recent ICE activities under the Trump administration. “What the U.S. and what ICE are doing in the streets, kidnapping our neighbors and essentially putting them in camps, is similar to concentration camps,” she said. “I am the proud child of immigrants, as is Alisa Payne and basically anyone else who is ot indigenous to this country. We believe immigrants are the foundation of this country. We are the American Dream and we’re not going anywhere.”
The Netflix documentary examines a shocking crime in Ocala, FL in 2023: the killing of a Black woman, 35-year-old mother of four Ajike Owens who was shot to death by her neighbor, a 58-year-old white woman named Susan Lorincz (Lorincz later tried to invoke Florida’s notorious stand your ground law in her defense).
Gandbhir tells the story almost entirely through police body cam and dash cam footage. Referring to the recent ICE related protest deaths in Minnesota of the 37 year old Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, Gandbhir said: “The importance of body camera footage is tantamount. It’s so critical because the counter narratives that are happening again at a government level and the lack of accountability and freedom to twist the truth [is prevalent.] Even though body camera footage can be a form of surveillance for vulnerable communities of color, it has also been used to criminalize it and we’ve seen it happen in Minneapolis with multiple murders.” she said.
Kwantu highlighted the difficulty of making the project in a fair way that shed light on the truth from all involved. “The body camera footage, it’s really interesting because when we got this footage, there was so much of it. And in going through it, we really wanted to be able to tell the story in its truest form. We had over 30 hours of footage and we had to condense that into 96 minutes, but still be able to tell you what happened and let you decide what the truth actually is,” he said. “We talk about this all the time, we could have had interviews, we could have directed people to a perspective, but we wanted Ajike [Owens], Susan Lorincz] and the community to tell their story in their words.”
Speaking more about the documentary’s importance as it heads to the 2026 Oscars ceremony next, Gandbhir added: “It’s important to note that, oftentimes, when people of color are killed in this manner, they are often criminalized. We felt the use of body cam footage in [our film] was undeniable. You see the community before, you see this multiracial multi-generational community before, and then you see the actions of this one violent outlier who changed the neighborhood, and you saw this beautiful young mother being taken from four children and you cannot ignore it. It’s undeniable what happened, even though people try to deny it.”