In the wake of the recent killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis at the hands of ICE agents, social media was flooded with videos that people picked apart frame by frame to try and analyze what happened. And despite footage that seemed obvious, pundits and politicians still retreated to their established points of view and talking points.
So what good is body camera footage on federal agents if people refuse to believe what they see? Geeta Gandbhir, the director of “The Perfect Neighbor,” which just won the Best Documentary award at the Independent Spirits, said that even with those counter narratives flying, we still need body camera footage to hold people accountable.
“The Perfect Neighbor” is constructed almost entirely through police body camera footage to tell the story of what happened in a small Florida community when a white neighbor used Stand Your Ground laws to justify killing a Black woman. Attending the awards show on Sunday, February 15 in Los Angeles, she and her team wore pins reading “ICE OUT,” and she argued that, just as body camera footage helped lead to accountability for the subject of “The Perfect Neighbor,” it can do the same in getting accountability for federal agents.
“The importance of body camera footage is tantamount, it is so critical,” Gandbhir said in the press room backstage at the Film Independent Spirit Awards. “The counter narratives are happening at a government level, the lack of accountability and the freedom to twist the truth. So even though body cam footage can be a form of surveillance — again for vulnerable communities of color, it has been used to criminalize us, it’s sometimes used to surveil us — but in this time, it is absolutely critical that law enforcement and government agents be held accountable. Body camera footage is part of that because the narrative will be twisted. We’ve seen it happen in Minneapolis with multiple murders.”
‘The Perfect Neighbor’Courtesy Netflix
Gandbhir called her film a “mirror to our society,” that it depicts an example of how a multiracial community was disrupted by “one outlier who used manufactured fear, weaponized racism, and predatory laws.” If that sounds familiar to what’s happening in Minneapolis and elsewhere in the U.S., it should.
“I think that we are seeing the ills that impacted that community are the ills we are seeing at large,” she said. “Those sorts of things are being weaponized against us in the U.S., and what ICE is doing in the streets, kidnapping our neighbors and essentially putting them in camps, which again, akin to concentration camps, it’s very similar.”
Alisa Payne, the producer of “The Perfect Neighbor,” also said backstage that when people see body camera footage, they need to resist counter narratives and acknowledge that the footage they’re seeing is “undeniable.”
“You saw the actions of this one violent outlier who changed the neighborhood, and you saw this beautiful young mother being taken from poor children, and you cannot ignore it,” Payne said. “It’s undeniable what happened. Even though people try to deny it, it’s undeniable.”