Netflix Finalizes Acquisition Of Sundance Prize Winner ‘The Perfect Neighbor’, Plans 2025 Release
UPDATED to note that Cinetic brokered the deal. EXCLUSIVE: It’s official. After weeks of indications that it would acquire The Perfect Neighbor, Netflix has finalized a deal for the film which won the directing award for U.S. Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival.
The streamer is planning a release later this year for the documentary directed by Geeta Gandbhir, putting it in position to become a strong Oscar contender. Terms of the deal were not announced, but some earlier reports pegged the acquisition figure in the range of $5 million.
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Through the use of police bodycam and dashcam footage, the documentary tells a heinous story from Central Florida. In 2023, Susan Lorincz, a white woman, fired a gun through her locked door, killing her Black neighbor, Ajike “AJ” Owens. Lorincz invoked Florida’s notorious “stand your ground” laws, claiming she feared for her life after Owens banged on her door following two years of friction over the white woman’s alleged harassment of Owens’ children.
The Perfect Neighbor is produced by Alisa Payne, Geeta Gandbhir and Nikon Kwantu for Message Pictures, and Sam Bisbee for Park Pictures. Executive producers are Sam Pollard for Message Pictures, Soledad O’Brien and Rose Arce for SO’B Productions, Jackie Kelman Bisbee and Wendy Neu for Park Pictures, and Takema Robinson.
“The Perfect Neighbor is a deeply personal project, created to transform grief into purpose and honor the lasting legacy of Ajike Owens and her family,” Gandbhir said in a statement. “My team at Message Pictures, along with our incredible partners at SO’B Productions and Park Pictures, are thrilled the film will be available on Netflix, offering audiences worldwide the chance to experience this urgent and powerful story.”
In an interview with Deadline at Sundance, Gandbhir elaborated on her personal connection to the story. “Ajika was a family friend,” she explained. “She was the best friend of my sister-in-law, Kimberly Robinson Jones. And so that is how the story came to me, through my family, and also through my other sister-in-law, Takema Robinson, who’s an EP on this project.”
Pamela Dias, Owens’ mother, also came to Deadline’s studio at Sundance.
“Ajika was an everyday mom, and that’s key here,” she told us. “She was an everyday mom with four beautiful children. This dispute arose over children playing together in this very close-knit community. They were not doing any harm. They were often supervised by one of the parents. So, for this to have happened, it’s tragic, it’s devastating, and it’s something that could have happened to any one of us, to any family. It was important for the story to be told because it unfolds so many layers. You have a close-knit community, you have children, you have the issue of racism, you have police protocol, you have children who lost their innocence. There’s so many aspects to the story that it just had to be told.”
Viridiana Lieberman edited the film. Music is by Laura Heinzinger. Cinetic handled sales on The Perfect Neighbor.
Gandbhir said she decided to build the film around police video after the footage was obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by attorneys for Owens’ family.
“I realized that we had the power to kind of flip the body camera footage on its head,” the director noted. “It’s usually used to surveil communities, it’s used to defend the police, but we could flip that and make it a tool to showcase this beautiful community and who they were before this tragedy.”
EP Sam Pollard praised that approach.
“Geeta and Viri [Viridiana] and the team have done something with archival footage, with this body cam footage, that made it so immersive that it’ll challenge all of us as filmmakers now in how to deal with this type of material,” he observed. “And that’s what makes it so unique and so special.”
The Perfect Neighbor screened at SXSW on Sunday, and it screens at the Austin, TX festival again on Tuesday and Thursday. The Perfect Neighbor makes its international premiere at CPH:DOX in Copenhagen on March 25, with Gandbhir expected to be in attendance.
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