A critically acclaimed new documentary's "subversive" use of bodycam and CCTV footage helps it to detail a shocking neighbourhood incident that became international news.

A new documentary explores a tragic incident that occurred in Florida in June 2023, when a white woman, Susan Lorincz, shot her black neighbour, Ajike Owens, through a locked front door, claiming she was in fear for her life. Lorincz later received a 25-year prison sentence for Owens's manslaughter. The Perfect Neighbor, directed by Geeta Gandbhir, has been praised by film critics for its groundbreaking approach, as around 90% of it consists of police body camera and CCTV footage. It shows the build-up to the shooting and Lorincz's increasing hostility towards her community.

The moment 58-year-old Susan Lorincz is arrested in June 2023 is shown in The Perfect Neighbor through CCTV cameras located in the police interview room in Marion County, Florida. She issues denial after denial to their requests to stand up, be handcuffed, and go with police officers. "No. I can't. I'm sorry," she says repeatedly. Minutes tick by, all of them shown on camera, while three officers persuade her to go voluntarily with them.

Until that interview, Susan Lorincz had been a free woman, not under arrest, despite a few days earlier firing a gun at her neighbour through a locked metal front door. Thirty-five-year-old Ajike Owens, known as AJ, was a restaurant manager and single mother of four children. Audiences learn through that interview that only two minutes before the shooting on 2 June 2023, Lorincz had called police to her house, because she and one of Owens's children had had a dispute over an electronic tablet. Lorincz tells police that during those two minutes, Owens had banged on Lorincz's door, shouting that she would kill her, and the older woman shot "in fear for my life". Lorincz continues to maintain from jail that she fired her gun out of fear, although sentencing her, the judge told her he believed the shooting was prompted "more by anger than fear".

Director Geeta Gandbhir's reconstruction of events has no narration, and doesn't rely on witness interviews, but instead on a doorbell camera, which captures the sound of a shot being fired, and Owens's son screaming to call 911. Police body cameras track paramedics trying to help Owens after she is shot. Later cameras follow, unrelentingly, as the children's father breaks the news to them that their mother "isn't coming back". And cameras inside the police car show Susan Lorincz, not under arrest, sitting in the back, while a neighbour shouts, "why did you do it?"

Gandbhir tells the BBC that the footage first came to her as she was a family friend of Owens's. Lawyers acting for the Owens family had requested the material from the police, and the family wanted to know if there might be anything to keep the case in the news. "There was about thirty hours of video about the case, including doorbell camera, bodycam and cell phone footage, detective interviews with people in the community, as well as audio recordings from Susan's conversations with the police, when she had called them many, many, many times," Gandbhir says. "It was a mess, but we managed to get through it, and that's when I realised it might be a film."

The footage shows that the first time police officers were called to Lorincz's address because of a dispute with Ajike Owens was in February 2022, when Lorincz claimed that Owens had thrown a "No Trespassing" sign that belonged to Lorincz at her and hit her on the leg (Owens said that she had thrown it on the ground and was not aiming it at her neighbour.) No one was arrested.

Police are called out several times through the following year, as Lorincz makes emergency calls complaining that local kids, including Owen's children, are tormenting her. "I'm a single woman, I work from home, I'm peaceful, I'm the perfect neighbour," Lorincz says in another call to the police, when she's........

© BBC