Brian Lairn on WNYC, and now we'll begin our annual series on the feature-length documentaries up for an Oscar.

Everyone else focuses on the entertainment films, and there's nothing wrong with that,

but we feature the documentaries in our nonfiction show lanes. First up is the perfect neighbor,

which premiered its Sundance and later became a breakout hit on Netflix. It tells a pretty

devastating story of Ajika Owens, a mother of four, who was shot by her neighbor, Susan Lawrence in Florida in 2023.

Now, Susan is white and Ajika was black.

The film is constructed almost entirely from police body camera footage, which I'll note is a pretty impressive feat of editing.

And it mostly depicts the two years leading up to this shooting, a period when Lawrence

would frequently call the cops on the neighborhood kids, including Ojikas, for playing in a grassy

lot next to her house. So we're watching an escalating neighborhood tension

unfold in real time as the cops keep returning to this block to manage Lawrence's complaint.

She starts to sound like a familiar archetype to some people a kind of, you kids get off

my lawn figure, but of course the racial overtones make it much darker and more ominous.

And after a couple of years of increasingly inflammatory 911 calls and encounters with

her neighbors, Lawrence shoots and kills Ajika Owens through her front door.

Now, Lawrence was ultimately sentenced to 25 years for the killing, but the case and the documentary raised

larger questions about Florida's Stand Your Ground Laws, which allows people, allow people to

use deadly force if they believe they're in danger. You might recall back in 2012 when

stand your ground laws faced a lot of national scrutiny after the killing of Trayvon Martin,

that black teenager whose shooter was acquitted.

Gita Gundabir is the director of the film, and she joins us now to talk about the movie and unpack some of its pretty heavy themes.

We'll also hear some of the documentary clips.

...