Start the week with a film: In ‘The Perfect Neighbour’, a starring role for bodycam footage

Films created partly or wholly out of pre-recorded footage now form a category of documentary that is particularly well stacked. Images from the past yield new meaning when placed in a different context. That is evident in Sandhya Suri’s Around India with a Movie Camera, which relooks at archival films made during British rule over India, and Sara Dosa’s Fire of Love, about a French scientist couple’s videos about volcanoes.

In Geeta Gandbhir’s The Perfect Neighbour, the raw material is bodycam footage recorded by police officers in the course of their duties. Gandbhir’s documentary, which is out on Netflix, is a powerful and harrowing chronicle of the challenges to coexistence in present-day America.

The Perfect Neighbour was premiered in January at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won Gandbhir the top award for direction. The documentary comprises footage that was filmed by police officers in Florida’s Marion Country between 2022 and 2024.

The officers record their responses to a slew of complaints made by an elderly white woman about her black neighbour’s children. Susan Lorincz objects to the children playing in the area in front of her house, which she claims belongs to her. The neighbour, Ajike Owens, points out that the space belongs to the community, rather than to Owens. Matters reach...

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