Oscar-Nominated Film ‘The Perfect Neighbor’ Started With a Fundraiser

“The Perfect Neighbor,” a documentary film about the murder of Ajike (A.J.) Owens, has been nominated for an Oscar. Executive producer Takema Robinson spoke to the Chronicle about the film, the fund she created to help Owens’s family and other victims of racial violence, and how philanthropy can do more to advance social justice.

Takema Robinson has spent most of her adult life in fundraising. She worked as a senior program officer at the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation and later co-founded the philanthropic strategy firm Converge. 

But the 2023 murder of her sister’s best friend changed all that. Robinson was out of the country when Ajike (A.J.) Owens, a Black woman, was shot and killed by a white neighbor after a seemingly minor but long-running dispute. 

Upon hearing the tragic news, Robinson hoped to jet directly to Owens’s Florida home. However, her trip required a layover in New York City, where her sister-in-law and filmmaker Geeta Gandbhir lived. Having seen the hateful and negative narrative that so often arose after shootings of Black people such as Trayvon Martin, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, they decided it would be important to document the aftermath of the shooting to shape an unbiased account of the incident. So Gandbhir arranged for a film crew to meet Robinson in Florida.  

Robinson and Gandbhir didn’t set out to create a film, but in 2025, The Perfect Neighbor premiered on Netflix to high ratings and acclaim.

This interview was edited for brevity and clarity.

How did The Perfect Neighbor film come about?

We started noticing that some of the local news channels were doing stories that included police bodycam footage. Because we knew the advocacy and the organizing journey was going to be long, we did a FOIA request for all of the footage surrounding the case. We were able to obtain around 30 hours of footage. 

Every single time that Susan Lorincz, who took A.J.’s life, called the police, two officers came out with body cameras. So there was footage that went back almost two years documenting all of these interactions. There was also the police interrogation of Lorincz. All of which, you see, became the film that is now The Perfect Neighbor.

How did your fundraising background come into play as you tried to help the Owens family after this tragedy?

I have moved billions of dollars in my career, but I could not move — other than through mechanisms like GoFundMe and that type of episodic crowdfunding — major donors to support a family like this because there’s no mechanism set up for this.

I found myself in a conundrum. I’ve worked with some amazing major donors during my career but couldn’t facilitate moving their resources to this family or toward the advocacy work that also needed to occur.

That dilemma birthed the Standing in the Gap Fund, which has raised $430,000.

What does the Standing in the Gap fund do?

It was initially created in 2023 as a response to this particular situation, but we quickly realized that we did not want another family to find themselves in this place. We believed that we couldn’t just do it for Ajike’s family. We needed an enduring legacy fund at a community foundation because they can give money directly to individuals. We also designed the fund to be able to support advocacy work. 

You’ve also started  the Impact Campaign, which holds screenings of the film in communities. Tell us about that.

This film is more than true-crime entertainment. The Impact Campaign is about using this film to raise awareness about racial justice and racial violence and to really go after policies like Stand Your Ground, which permit people to use force, even deadly force, to defend themselves against perceived threats. And then it’s also to tap into people’s hearts, minds, and wallets to [give to] this fund, so we can support families in the future who are impacted by racial violence. 

We’ve had hundreds of screenings at this point, and we usually spend time with the audience afterwards. It’s a very hard film to watch. Our audiences are often without words for the first few minutes after a screening. In some places, we have provided support for folks, bringing in somatic healers (holistic practitioners who aim to assist with stress and trauma relief) to help people through breathing, and then we facilitate a conversation.

In the nonprofit sector, there’s often frustration with how Big Philanthropy works. How is Standing in the Gap different?

I often say, what would have happened if Rosa Parks had to write a proposal? We would never have had the civil rights movement.

It is a return to the basics of philanthropy. This country created the policy that emboldened A.J.’s killer to take her life. So it is on us as citizens of this country to show up and to stand in the gap when these things happen. 

I’ve been really intentional since the beginning of this that there is a role for institutional philanthropy, but there is also a role for individual donors. Our approach had to include both, and we had to be creative, especially in this environment where we saw philanthropy recede. So we decided to make a film that can’t be ignored. 

And speaking of the film, what is your hope for its future, on the heels of it getting this Oscar nomination?

I think about The Perfect Neighbor and it’s being mentioned in the same sentences as An Inconvenient Truth, which changed the environmental justice movement. I think about what this movie does: It invites masses of people into a conversation around racial justice in our country and then invites them to be part of our movement to support this work.