The documentary follows the killing of Ajike Owens, a Black mother of four in Ocala, Florida, shot by her white neighbor, Susan Lorincz, after a two-year dispute over children playing in a vacant lot.
What makes the film remarkable is that director Geeta Gandbhir built it almost entirely from evidence (police body cameras, Ring cameras, dashboard cameras, 911 calls) with no traditional talking-head interviews to soften the experience.
The person responsible for turning 25-plus hours of multi-format surveillance footage into a 97-minute film that feels like a thriller is editor Viridiana Lieberman.
She’s an Emmy-winning editor whose credits include I Am Evidence and The Sentence, both for HBO, and she’s been collaborating with Gandbhir since the beginning of her feature career. The Perfect Neighbor won the U.S. Documentary directing award at Sundance 2025 and has since received an Oscar nomination.
We spoke with Lieberman about what it takes to edit a film like this. You’ll learn the process, the responsibility, and what documentary editors at any level can take from it.
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Editor’s note: The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
No Film School: Your process sounds so interesting, especially when you get such an enormous amount of footage, especially footage that isn’t shot in the traditional sense. How do you start thinking about it from a storytelling or an editorial perspective?
Viridiana Lieberman: I think with The Perfect Neighbor, once Geeta, the director, came to me and talked about, “I think we can make the whole film out of this evidence,” that process became the guiding north star of everything we were doing.
We weren’t going to be going out and filming more or getting more. We also knew that by using the evidence, we were setting ourselves up with a responsibility to show the truth of what happened. And that would include being chronological. There are certain levels of the process where, usually, when you start a film, you’re sitting there going, “Okay, how are we going to tell this story?” And once we knew, “Okay, it’s going to be chronological,” that’s a huge hurdle you blow by.
And then after that, it becomes working through all of those calls and all those materials to build a balance and a structure and obviously a narrative, build in all the things we want, but to keep it captivating.
But the initial discovery through all of those materials in that footage was really about finding the balance of knowing that we had two years of calls that we were going to have to create the expanding and contracting of time to be able to get those two years in before the event, and then understanding how long that night would run in the film, and then coming into the third act to get away from some of the body cam footage, but keep that same visual language and all of that.
When you look at these types of materials, the challenge is really honing it in the balance of the whole film, less so about what that approach will be and how we utilize them. Because it was very clear what would do what. For example, in the interstitials and those bridges, when we have those canvassing interviews, we knew that when those police showed up to the scene, they were usually after the incident happened, everybody’s talking about retrospectively what happened when they called, so how do we fill in that gap?
Those bridges in our structure became not only thematic headers of processing what we just saw and where we’re headed next, but also a bit of a break from the body cam footage, allowing people to just listen. They’re really filling in the story and building and helping us understand and process what we’ve seen.
So all those mechanics, all those devices help us start to look through the footage and make choices in the lens of the film, but also in what we’re trying to get done.
NFS: It’s impressive because that framework is so invisible to most people, and it’s such an important guideline for how you experience the story. I’ve read that your process is to watch everything and then break it down. How do you find the people and the storylines?
VL: I am kind of a purist. I want to see everything. I always suggest to all editors that watching the footage is—obviously, it seems like a captain obvious thing—but not everybody watches all the footage. I mean, some people get the selects from other folks, or they know they kind of enter the footage looking for something rather than watching the footage for what it’s doing.
From the very beginning of my journey, I’ve always felt like, okay, of course I’m going to have this walkabout with my director. We’re going to talk about tone and some ideas, certainly intention, and what they hope that the audience walks away with, big-picture thoughts, and any kind of stylized moments along the way that they imagined or always knew had to be vital to the story. So have that walkabout.
And then it’s about watching the footage and having an experience myself in watching that footage and what it’s really doing. Because in previous films, not The Perfect Neighbor specifically, but there are times where the director comes to you and says, “This moment was incredible,” and they’re just so sure of it, but then the footage doesn’t quite do everything they want it to. It was really being there in the moment, and when they captured it, and what it meant.
So, then the job of the edit is to create the conditions for that earned moment.
‘The Perfect Neighbor’ Credit: Netflix
We know that in the approach of The Perfect Neighbor, there really is a larger thematic conversation happening. And one of the early directions that Geeta gave me was to stay rooted with the neighborhood, that we had this ensemble of people that we weren’t going to need to know the names of or everything about. They represent a community. And in some ways, they also represent the idea that anybody could have knocked on that door that night, that it becomes emblematic of such a larger conversation with all the themes the film engages with.
So my goal in the edit to stay rooted with the community was to think of them as a character unto themselves altogether, which is really the theme of connecting and watching out for each other’s kids, and these kids playing, and what they see. And Susan.
But all of that 360-degree wasn’t really about tracking a specific person. It was about tracking an idea. And by keeping that broad, it allowed the audience to take a lot more from this film than just “stand your ground.” I mean, it engages with conversations of racism and classism and economics and state. All of these things come into play, and this film created the space to do that kind of work.
What the driving factor, particularly with The Perfect Neighbor, was more about theme and emotional intention, and these perspectives where we’re learning new things. Each call, we’re peeling the layers of this simmering to a boil. So it’s an all-encompassing immersive journey, but it isn’t about getting distracted by tracking a specific person or the facts that have to align with a specific story. There is so much repetition, which is a part of our story, but always knowing that there’s new information and that we’re driving toward this event that you do glimpse in the cold open, you know it’s coming.
So that created the conditions for us to be able to move at this much more real-time pace
NFS: You talking about the neighborhood as a character made me think of those moments of lightness that we get too. How did you land on those moments, or how much of that did you feel like you were going to be able to get in?
VL: Every drop we possibly could. For this film, something that was so important was being able to see that community before everything happens, before it’s torn apart.
So yes, those calls are talking about complaints, but they’re also giving a vision of this neighborhood, which was so precious and rare when it comes to documentaries, particularly about stories like these, where we’re just talking about what happened and then retrospectively, but to be able to see it, to be with those kids.
One of my favorite scenes is the one that makes everybody laugh, where they say, “We’re 11,” when she’s talking about stealing the car, and the kids are playing, and you’re watching it going, “Wow, in the year 2022 or 23, kids are playing out in the streets,” and there’s so much joy. Even the adults intermixed with the tension that’s happening in the neighborhood are sitting there going, “Oh, these are my kids.” And they’re joking around.
That stuff is vital. It was vital on an emotional level; it was vital in the balance of the experience of watching the film. So it’s not all brutal, but it was mostly vital for the truth to actually see who these people are, so that from the very beginning, there was a priority in picking the calls and really resting in the ones where you got to experience that as much as possible.
NFS: Can you talk a little bit about sound syncing and all those things that you had to deal with on the edit side?
VL: A lot of the times there were multiple police officers on the scene, so it did play like a multicam, which is really fascinating because sometimes they were in the same spot, but then they’d split. And what that enabled beyond the idea of being able to hear and see many perspectives, but that actually gave the opportunity to control time a bit, because everything was going to happen in a factual way when it was happening, but how do you cut down calls when they all range between 30 minutes and three hours? And on the night of the event, that was like six hours.
So we have to find ways to continue to be true to what happened, but be able to condense that time and make those choices so you’re always dealing with new information. So in some ways, it was a challenge to use body cam footage to do that.
‘The Perfect Neighbor’ Credit: Netflix
And then sometimes it was the tool to be able to actually navigate all of these spaces. I did become absolutely obsessed with human behavior. Where they’re standing, which direction they’re heading, and when they’re interacting with people. Even though the film is not explicitly about police, even though it does thankfully ignite really nuanced conversations about policing and what could have been done, it still creates some frames that I don’t think any DP in the world would dream of capturing.
It’s really a phenomenal thing once you surrender to the process of working with that footage to see what it does and how it works. And in embracing all the moments. Some people like to talk about when police officers are walking all the way to the car door or things like that, and why did we go that far? And the truth is that it wasn’t really about always showing, okay, we’re showing when they turn off and when they turn on, all those spaces are giving you time with the neighborhood, right?
It’s allowing you to hear more and more, and it was a full sensory thing. So challenges kind of turned into the tools and the choices that did the most effective work in this film.
One of the challenges that I’ll share is how responsible I felt, because it was evidence, to stay synced with everything you’re seeing. So all the audio is synced to what you are seeing. And the example I’ll give is that in cam footage, let’s imagine when they’re calling medics, “We need medics!” When that was blasting into the car, that’s the dash cam moment I’m using. It was trying to make sure that we stayed true in every cut.
So when I created that, the event, when I was cutting that, not only was it chronological, but it was really about making those choices whenever I was active to not cheat anything. You weren’t hearing a voice that wasn’t on that video in that moment, because that was the way we could make the film undeniable.
It’s just factual, but the challenge, of course, is still creating that cinematic narrative build. And there is a lot, particularly in that night, that we’re playing on genre. When Geeta said she felt like it was a horror film, that’s probably one of the highest sensory cinematically edited sequences in the film. But all of that footage is still happening in order and synced up to what was happening.
Lieberman’s editing set-upCredit: Lieberman/Provided
NFS: If you did have something that you wanted to include but you didn’t have the audio or the angle, what did you do?
VL: It depended on where it fell in the story. There was nothing that I felt needed to be wedged in. It’s such a specific thing with this film that I was able to just follow the footage. There were no moments that we had to manipulate or cheat because we were just working with what we had, knowingly, from the beginning.
As an editor, I will say this: I always take on a challenge on any project I’m on to do that. When they give me the footage, to not imagine what else we’ll get or project what I hope we will, it’s: work with what you have and then figure out what you need. With this film, knowing that what we had was all we were going to work with, that was the challenge set forth that I was strictly committed to.
There were people on our team who had moments where they wavered. Because there were big things we had to ask ourselves. The reality [was] that we wouldn’t spend a lot of time with Ajike, which was really a hard threshold to cross in committing to this approach.
So there were moments where there were questions, but then no, we’re doing this, and this is what we committed to doing. So, in this particular film with this particular set of rules of the world that we had created in the edit, there was no moment that would’ve been out of order from what I wanted to use.
Anything that didn’t make it in that I was moved by or found fascinating or whatever reason that I thought it could play a role wasn’t in there because there were more important things happening. It wasn’t like, “How do we fit it in?” It was like, “Oh, that’s interesting too. But these other things are far more significant.”
So with this film, there wasn’t a lot of those choices to be made, but cutting down, you are making a lot of choices along the way, for sure.
NFS: What were the tools that you were using?
VL: Cutting on Premiere. And within Premiere, it was pretty straightforward.
One thing I love about Premiere is that you can just pull in anything you can dream¸ and hit the ground running. Every single source was a different resolution, size, and kind. I mean body cam, dash cam, Ring cams, 911 calls, canvassing calls, CCTV, interrogation cameras. All of that stuff was different. I was able to pull it in and start cutting.
And then near the end, I mark up my footage a lot. I’m one of those people where it’s good to have the transcriptions, and it’s good to have all of it, but I just mark, mark up, mark up, mark up when I’m cutting, because I want it to be searchable.
With this one, even though I had marked up the interrogations heavily, near the end, when I had to hunt for something, I was able to pop into that speech-to-text, which was something I hadn’t really played with a lot, and was able to search those so fast. That was the one certain treasure-chest gem of a feature that I dug into. But the rest was classic Premiere, just like an old picture editor on there. It works. You just put it in, and you can make the magic happen.
NFS: Documentary editing is a really unique beast. Is there something that you would say to an aspiring doc editor, “Here’s what you need to learn first?”
VL: The biggest piece of advice that I kind of give in editing in general, but particularly in documentary, is to trust the process. You do not have to know everything right off the bat. The whole magic for me in documentary editing is discovery, which means that although a director that you’re working with and producers in this powerhouse team, that hopefully you’ll have the privilege of working with, certainly have a vision and they have an intention.
And at the same time, because documentary is such a malleable [medium], the life changes, the world changes, what it needs from a story—the footage can sometimes find a whole new story. I’ve been a part of docs where we thought it was about one person, and then in the edit, we find out it’s about someone else in the footage; these things happen.
‘The Perfect Neighbor’Credit: Netflix
So you have to leave all doors open to that discovery and not control it so much because you can’t control life, stories, and the world. You can talk about perspective, and you can talk about the choices we make to make it feel emotional and captivating and compelling, and all the things that we have to do as editors. But there’s such an important part of discovery where you follow the footage, and you’re able to maximize what was captured, what happened, and you can be open to trying new things.
Something that I’m so proud of with The Perfect Neighbor and that I hope I take with me … really is trusting instincts and finding a way to make things feel singular and specific.
And right now in documentary, I think that it’s getting a little dicey with the algorithm and formulas and expectations of what things are. And I’m really excited for myself and everybody who’s a creative, who’s willing to take on this challenge like me, to meet every story where it is and to watch all the materials for what they are. And particularly in docs, and don’t force it into a comp or making a “thing like that thing,” we can take inspiration.
But I think it’s a really vital, critical moment, particularly now for all doc editors and especially with fresh energy, new doc editors, to come in and say, “Okay, what is the only thing this film can do with these materials in this story, in this moment?”
And I think that that is something that we can take at any point in our career and get excited about what we bring. And it’s like us in a collaboration and also us personally, editors have an incredible voice in this process, and you shouldn’t be afraid to use it.
NFS: Is there anything else that you would like people to know about your work on this or the film itself?
VL: I want it to do all of the work in justice and social discourse and all of those things, but on a craft level, something that gets me so excited is how much people are talking about editing and process and the end approach in a way that I hope just keeps opening doors for more form, pushing ideas and something that no matter what level you’re at as an editor, you can do while you’re honing what you do.
So that’s something I’m very proud of, but I am pretty blown away with how the film has been resonating, and I think that that just infuses more confidence into me and what I hope for all documentaries right now.
