Homepage

One of the most damning films on this year’s Oscar shortlist for Best Documentary, THE PERFECT NEIGHBOR is comprised almost entirely of police body-cam footage surrounding the 2023 murder of Ajike Owens, a Black mother of four killed by her white neighbor. In THE PERFECT NEIGHBOR, director Geeta Gandbhir has crafted, in her first film, documentary that illustrates how procedural, workaday, and very much publicly available “b-roll” can elicit more suspense, and depict more horror, than any Hollywood set. It’s a chilling indictment of Stand Your Ground laws and the deadly morass of fear, isolation, surveillance and gun culture. As IndieWire put it in their review from the film’s Sundance debut, where it won the Directing Award for U.S. Documentary: “To encourage citizens to be the gun-toting arbiters of their own reality is to weaponize — all too literally — the most dangerous biases they foster on an everyday basis. It’s bad enough that we allow the police to do that, but it might be even worse to grant that power to someone who likes to think of themselves as the perfect neighbor.”

Tuesday, May 12th at 1pm and 7pm