Fearing Florida’s Stand Your Ground law would absolve Lorincz of criminal wrongdoing, filmmaker Geeta Gandbhir and partne producer Nikon Kwantu, family friends of Owens, immediately went into action to keep the slain mother’s story in the news. When they received thumb drive with body cam, dash cam and other footage of the events, they realized there was more to say about privilege, policing, and the impact they have on communities of color.

Docu begins with your personal connection to Ajike

GEETA GANDBHIR The night Ajike was shot, we immediately sprang into action along with the community and her network to try to keep the story alive in the media. Susan Lorincz was not immediately arrested, and we weren’t sure because of Stand Your Ground if she would ever be arrested.

Two months after the incident, we received from family lawyers the body camera footage. They used the Freedom of Information Act to request from the Marion County Sheriff’s Department all the materials. That included body camera footage, Ring camera footage, dash cam video, detective interviews and the 911 calls that you hear. I took a couple of weeks, because I used to be an editor, and strung it out. That was our process of grief work. We felt compelled to understand how this could happen. How can someone pick up a gun to solve trivial dispute with their neighbor over children playing in a yard next to their house, where they had permission? After I strung it out, we realized that the police had been called to the scene for two years. That’s when we thought there might be footage for a whole film.

GANDBHIR The decision to live in the body camera footage came from a couple places. One, when I thought about going back to and re-interviewing the community, I didn’t want to re-traumatize them through that process. What you hear in the film are the detective interviews. So they’d already had to relive it, and I couldn’t see doing it again. There was the piece of how immersive and undeniable the body camera footage is. We were not on the ground directing anything. This footage shows things exactly as they unfolded — without reporter, without filmmaker, without journalist on the ground. It feels undeniable. It also feels immersive and cinematic as filmmakers. The cops functioned, unintentionally, as multicam. They unintentionally captured this beautiful community as they were before. You never see a community, particularly one like this, living their lives with this strong social network, raising children together, all the love you see. We really wanted to subvert the traditional use of body camera footage — which is used for people of color to surveil us, to criminalize us, to protect the police — by showing these children as they were and humanizing them.

Susan is given option to write a letter to Ajike’s family 

GANDBHIR I am obsessed with that scene. I’m obsessed with that final moment where the police cannot get her out of the chair. It’s so fascinating to me to hear reactions to it. Sometimes people laugh, they’re furious, they can’t believe it. But for us, it really showcased who she was. She is a person who repeatedly tried to weaponize her privilege and her police against multiracial community. But her anger was really directed toward Ajike and her children, who are Black, and she was using it to manipulate the police. The scene is the epitome of their relationship throughout the film where the police treat [Susan] as a client and they do not see the community as being worth protecting. When the detective comes back and he’s reading [what she wrote] for the camera, was so powerful. We got to hear it. The idea of show-and-not-tell is critical in this storytelling. We believe our audience is smart and engaged and can follow the story without extra hand-holding and can come to their own conclusions.

ALISA PAYNE Anyone who’s lost a parent so young, the main provider, the main hugger, there is a definite gap in their life. Pam was living in another state and had to leave her job, her friends and her existence as she knew it to go and raise these kids. But nothing can replace a mother’s love. So she says that they are courageous and brave because they go out into the world every day despite all the fears that they have. They’ll never be the same, and the children and the adults in the community will never be the same. But in her turning pain into purpose, [Pam] has started Standing in the Gap Fund to support other families who have experienced race-based violence. We encourage everyone to go to standinginthegapfund.org to see what they’re doing.