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Saturday, June 14
1:00 PM - 2:45 PM

Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company

641 D St NW, Washington, DC 20004

The Perfect Neighbor

Director

Geeta Gandbhir

Executive Producers

Sam Pollard, Takema Robinson, Soledad O’Brien, Rose Arce, Jackie Kelman Bisbee, Wendy Neu

Producers

Geeta Gandbhir, Alisa Payne, Nikon Kwantu, Sam Bisbee

Editor

Viridiana Lieberman

Consulting Editor

Co-Editor

Assistant Editor

Cinematographer

Additional Cinematography

Music

Laura Heinzinger

Sound

Narration

Contact

In a close-knit Florida neighborhood, a parcel of vacant land becomes the center of a tragic conflict. What begins as a seemingly minor dispute over children playing escalates into a horrifying chain of events that devastates a community and sparks a national reckoning with Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” laws. At the heart of the story is Ajike Owens, a vibrant Black mother of four, whose life becomes entangled in a chilling clash with her White neighbor, Susan Lorincz—a conflict that reveals the darker undercurrents of prejudice, entitlement, and systemic failure.

Through an extraordinary feat of documentary filmmaking, THE PERFECT NEIGHBOR reconstructs the harrowing sequence of events using almost exclusively police bodycam footage, detective interviews, and witness testimonies. Director Geeta Gandbhir captures the relentless escalation with searing clarity, turning a seemingly ordinary neighborhood dispute into a gripping examination of race, power, and the legal systems that shape our lives.

Unflinching and urgent, THE PERFECT NEIGHBOR lays bare how everyday conflicts can expose deep fault lines in society, revealing the devastating consequences of fear, prejudice, and systemic inequities within our communities.

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Geeta Gandbhir

Director, The Perfect Neighbor

Geeta Gandbhir is an award-winning filmmaker. She embarked on a career in narrative film under the guidance of Spike Lee and Sam Pollard. After working for eleven years in scripted film, collaborating with renowned figures such as the Coen Brothers, Robert Altman, and others, she transitioned into documentary filmmaking. She is currently directing a series for Netflix with Spike Lee and Samantha Knowles, which is a retrospective on New Orleans post-Katrina.

As a Director, recent credits include The Perfect Neighbor, which premiered at Sundance in 2025, short film Reclaimed for Sesame Workshop, The Devil is Busy for HBO, the Oscar Shortlisted film How We Get Free for HBO, the series Born in Synanon for Paramount, the series Eyes on the Prize for HBO, the feature doc Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power, which was nominated for the 2022 Critics Choice Award, won a 2023 SIMA Award, and won a 2023 Emmy Award. She directed and show-ran the series Black and Missing for HBO, which won a 2022 NAACP Award for Best Directing, a 2022 Independent Spirit Award for Best Documentary Series, a 2022 ATAS Honors Award, and a Cinema Eye Honors for Best Series. She directed the film Apart, with Rudy Valdez, for HBO Max, which was nominated for an NAACP Award and won a 2022 Emmy Award.

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