Where Was ‘The Perfect Neighbor’ Filmed?

By Anna Menta

Using almost exclusively police footage, The Perfect Neighbor documentary on Netflix details the harrowing, two-year lead up to a deadly crime, when Florida woman Susan Lorincz shot and killed her Black neighbor, 35-year-old Ajike Owens.

For over two years, Lorincz had been harassing her neighbors, from shouting obscenities at their kids, to frequent 911 calls to complain about children playing near her “property.” (In fact, Lorincz was a renter.) In June 2023, multiple witnesses say they saw Lorincz throw roller skates at a 10-year-old boy. After he told his mother what happened, Ajike Owens marched over to knock on Lorincz’s door, to stand up for her son. Lorincz shot Owens through the locked front door, and killed her.

After the killing, Lorincz attempted to utilize Florida’s stand-your-ground law as a defense, arguing that because she feared for her life, she was legally allowed to use deadly force. It’s the same defense that ultimately helped get another Florida resident, George Zimmerman,—who shot and killed the unarmed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in 2012—acquitted.

In The Perfect Neighbor, directed by Geeta Gandbhir, viewers watch the case play out almost entirely via police body camera footage, surveillance video, and detective interviews. The documentary ends with Lorincz in court, where she was found guilty of manslaughter by an all-white six person jury. The documentary makes you feel like you’re living in the footage. But where is it that The Perfect Neighbor happened?

Photo: Netflix

Where did The Perfect Neighbor take place?

The Perfect Neighbor takes place in residential community in Ocala, Florida, a small city in the north part of central Florida. Most of the footage in The Perfect Neighbor comes from the Marion Country Sheriff’s Office, the county where Ocala is located.

Photo: Google Maps

The footage was acquired by the lawyers for Pamela Dias, the mother of Ajike Owens. Lawyers filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the sheriff’s office.

According to The Perfect Neighbor director Geeta Gandbhir in a recent interview with Decider, after the FOIA request, “Everything was released. It became public record—everything that they had pertaining to the case. It was sent to us to look through, to see if there’s anything newsworthy. It came in a giant mess, on a thumb drive. About 30 hours of material—cell phone footage, ring camera footage, dash cam footage, calls to the police, detective interviews. It took a couple of weeks to sort through it.”

Gandbhir, whose relatives had been friends with Ajike Owens, offered to help support the family in any way she could. As a filmmaker and editor, she volunteered to go through the footage, to see if there was anything news-worthy to post on social media or send to the news.

“Susan wasn’t immediately arrested. We were worried about stand-your-ground,” Gandbhir explained. “Because we work in media, we were trying to to make sure it stayed alive in the news.”

Photo: Courtesy of Netflix

It wasn’t until after Gandbhir started piecing together the police footage into a timeline that she realized the footage alone could be a feature film. Almost all the film is either body camera footage, dash camera footage, surveillance interviews, or police interviews.

That said, there is some footage in the film that was shot by Gandbhir and her team, which did not come from the released police footage.

“We did shoot some material, because we were there,” Gandbhir explained. “We were on the ground before we got the body camera footage, and we were shooting things to share with the news. The funeral, the vigils, the protests—some of that, we shot, for the news and social media. You hear Pamela’s voice at the end—that’s from the funeral. Not all the audio is detective interviews. Some of it is stuff that we got. But the majority of it is [from the police].”