Ondi Timoner, David Timoner Rebound After Shedding Properties In L.A. Fires

In occasions of disaster, the Timoners stick collectively.

When household patriarch Eli Timoner suffered a debilitating stroke in 1982 – on the top of his enterprise profession as Air Florida, the airline he based in Miami, was flourishing – it was mother Lisa who rallied the spirits of their kids – Rachel, Ondi, and David.

“Mother invented the T Workforce” (T as in Timoner), recollects Ondi. “Mother is the one who stated within the wake of pop’s stroke, when she’s an 8-year-old, a 10-year-old and a 12-year-old, ‘We’re going to run races collectively. We’re going to be sturdy collectively… We’re going to beat all this and it’s going to be nice and we’re going to have the most effective time. We’re the T Workforce.’”

Virtually 40 years after his stroke, together with his well being declining, Eli Timoner determined to convey his life to an in depth as allowed beneath California’s Finish of Life Act. Once more, the Timoners got here collectively to help Eli’s determination, his closing days captured in Ondi’s Emmy-nominated and Humanitas Prize-winning documentary Final Flight Residence.

“The explanation Final Flight Residence is uplifting,” Ondi observes, “is there’s this love and there’s this gentle within the movie that’s not distinctive simply to our household. In a demise that truly folks flip in the direction of and face, there may be that gentle.”

Since January, the Timoners have been going through one other extraordinary problem. When the Eaton Fireplace broke out on January 7 in Los Angeles County, it tore via Altadena, destroying constructing after constructing. Ondi’s residence and David’s residence, a mile aside, burned to the bottom.

“Seventeen folks died between his home and mine,” Ondi says. With out fast motion by David to rescue his mom, who lived close to Eaton Canyon, Lisa Timoner won’t have escaped.

“I pulled as much as mother’s home and it was raining ash, no energy,” David remembers. “There have been firemen with loopy lights and bullhorns saying, ‘Evacuate now! Evacuate now!’ Everyone was working for his or her lives mainly. Site visitors jam, the wind was howling.”

He managed to securely evacuate his mom alongside along with her pets aside from one cat who hid inside the home amid the chaos and couldn’t be coaxed out. Inside hours, David and Ondi’s homes have been gone, the fireplace consuming irreplaceable treasures like artworks by David’s spouse Kelly, Ondi’s journals, and household heirlooms.

“I had a stack of affection letters with a ribbon that they [Eli and Lisa] had written to one another that was on the bar in the home that burned,” Ondi says. “One of many letters was mother apologizing for going over funds on their one-year anniversary. She purchased this double happiness coronary heart, after which had it damaged in half and pa wore one aspect and she or he wore the opposite.” Fortuitously, Ondi was sporting the half of the pendant she inherited from her father. “You see it on me on a regular basis,” says Ondi. Provides her mom, “I’m so glad it was on her.”

Ondi and her spouse, musician-composer Morgan Physician, have been in Europe when the fireplace struck, at work on Ondi’s newest movie, a hybrid documentary with scripted components that tells a narrative associated to the Holocaust.

“It’s for Legendary [Entertainment]… We have been scouting [in Budapest] the day the home burned down,” she says, noting that they returned later to shoot within the constructing that they had scouted.

“It was positively eerie to return there to make this movie, nevertheless it was additionally very heartening truly,” Ondi feedback. “It was heartening to appreciate that we may come collectively as artists and make one thing, even with all the horrible destruction in our world proper now, all the mindless loss from the fires. But additionally, clearly, we’re not the primary local weather refugees you’re going to know personally as a result of that is just the start of the unraveling of our planet.”

She provides, “Politically, we’re in such a really darkish place and the rise of the fitting everywhere in the world… It was so revitalizing to us to have the ability to be on set with nice artists and making lovely imagery that’s vital and haunting and it’s going to be, I feel, actually vital work.”

Timoner has been making vital work within the narrative and documentary areas for 30 years now, generally in collaboration along with her brother David. Because the household coped with the devastating loss from the fires, they reassembled earlier this month in Miami, the place the Timoner children grew up (solely Rachel, who’s a rabbi in New York, couldn’t be current; she is at present on sabbatical, touring in South America). The event: a retrospective of lots of Ondi’s movies placed on in her hometown by the Miami Movie Pageant.

“We’ve bought not one, not two, not three, however 4,” notes pageant govt director James Woolley. “So, we’re very proud.”

Among the many movies screened by MFF — Final Flight Residence and DIG! XX, the latter documentary an up to date and expanded model of DIG!, which gained the Grand Jury Prize for U.S. Documentary on the 2004 Sundance Movie Pageant. The movie, exploring the friendship and rivalry between up-and-coming rock bands The Brian Jonestown Bloodbath and The Dandy Warhols, is taken into account one of many biggest music documentaries ever. David Timoner served as a cinematographer and co-producer on the unique DIG! and he edited the 20^th anniversary up to date model.

MFF additionally screened Ondi Timoner’s two newest documentaries, THE INN BETWEEN and All God’s Youngsters. AGC options Ondi’s sister Rachel — senior rabbi at Congregation Beth Elohim in Park Slope, Brooklyn – and Dr. Robert Waterman, lead pastor at Antioch Baptist Church within the Bedford-Stuyvesant space of Brooklyn. Collectively, the rabbi and the preacher took on the noble if precarious job of bringing their congregations collectively to construct bridges, promote peace, and try and heal centuries of antisemitism and racism.

THE INN BETWEEN, in the meantime, facilities on a novel hospice in Salt Lake Metropolis that gives take care of unhoused folks. The challenge took place after Ondi’s mother noticed an article on the hospice revealed within the L.A. Instances and shared it along with her daughter. Says Ondi, “She’s my scout.”

THE INN BETWEEN performed to a packed home at MFF. “The group went loopy for it,” Ondi reviews. “I feel folks want hopeful tales of peace and neighborhood proper now.”

For the Timoners, being in Miami offered some therapeutic after a lot latest loss. “Seeing associates and feeling the nice and cozy embrace of our neighborhood,” says David, “it’s been wonderful. Miami is a very particular place. There’s only a few vernacular locations left in America. Issues are so homogenized. Miami won’t ever turn out to be the Midwest… It’s simply at all times going to be its personal particular mixture of loopy.”

Sitting down with Deadline on the historic Biltmore Lodge in Miami Seashore, Ondi and David mirrored on rising up close by.

“There’s a whole lot of issues about Florida that I completely am embarrassed by politically however there’s a free-spiritedness,” David observes, telling his sister it could clarify “why you’re as a lot of a insurgent as you’re. It actually helps your insurgent spirit. Like, it’s a lawless place, Miami.”

Ondi and David admit that as youngsters they might have contributed only a bit to that lawless vibe. “What will we wish to say?” David muses. “I desire a statute of limitations!”

There was that scavenger hunt stunt they pulled off again within the day. “You needed to get issues like road indicators, choose up a set of twins,” recollects Ondi.

We’re not speaking a recreation of “I Spy” the place you see one thing and transfer on. No, this concerned persuading a set of twins to go together with them, in addition to eradicating road indicators and prying off a manhole cowl. Ondi: “You needed to take it again to the social gathering.” David: “Truthfully, it could have been an incredible documentary brief.”

Their mom didn’t flip a blind eye to those adventures in highschool or later, after they turned budding filmmakers. Extra like an harmless eye.

“Ondi would say, ‘We’re touring with the band, a rock band.’ And I might say, ‘Oh, that’s good darling, have enjoyable.’ I had no concept,” Lisa Timoner recollects. “After which after I noticed DIG!, David was commenting on it. My candy son stated, ‘I attempted every thing on the desk. Medication!’” Lisa says. “I used to be very naïve.”

“She discovered my marijuana pipe as soon as,” David recounts. “She stated, ‘What’s this?’ And I stated, ‘Oh, it’s just a bit sculpture…’ She was so naïve. And it was fantastic.”

The household suffered appreciable financial hardship after Eli Timoner’s stroke. He was compelled out as chairman of the board of Air Florida, the results of narrow-minded considering in that period when it was simply assumed an individual with a incapacity couldn’t run a enterprise enterprise (a board member instructed Eli on the time, “We have to come from a place of energy, and what do you suppose Lehman Bros. will consider an airline run by a cripple?”). Regardless of that reversal of fortune, Eli and Lisa didn’t stress the children to curtail their desires.

“I actually suppose if I have been shedding all my cash, I might’ve been telling my kids, ‘Go to f**king legislation college,’ or ‘Get a job that pays,’ as a result of I might’ve been terrified that I wouldn’t be capable to help them,” David says. “However they have been identical to, ‘No matter makes you content, I imagine in you.’”

Ondi achieved her dream of changing into a filmmaker. She’s at work not solely on the Holocaust-related movie, however on a story adaptation of her father’s story documented in Final Flight Residence (the filmmaker tells Deadline she labored on the script along with her father for 8 years, and skim the present draft to him on his demise mattress). And after the wildfires struck Los Angeles, Ondi did what Ondi does – she picked up a digital camera.

“We’ve been making a documentary ever since, speaking to our neighbors who ran for his or her lives,” Timoner shares. “Taking a look at Altadena post-burn, it’s actually one thing extraordinary to behold. You may’t imagine it. There’s actually nothing left… That’s why I used to be calling the film Bonded by Fireplace. As a result of in a manner, anyone who’s going via this proper now — which there are sadly 16,000 households going via this and 50- to 70,000 local weather refugees — it doesn’t matter. It appears the identical. All of us have this sludge that’s form of monochromatic and amorphous, however we’re additionally bonded by hearth… Our lives all turned the other way up proper because the yr began.”

Throughout this unbelievable check, the Timoners can rely on one factor – the household bond. Ondi’s spouse Morgan Physician, the most recent member of the household, first witnessed that at a wrenching time for them when Eli was getting ready to say farewell.

“It may usually convey out the worst in folks, not the most effective,” Physician says, “and I simply discovered that this household has at all times been sturdy and regular, and I used to be so shocked throughout this huge change and upheaval… the household, it was nonetheless simply so strong and tight.”