Veteran documentary filmmaker Ondi Timoner and her wife, Morgan Doctor, were working on a film in Rome on Jan. 7 when they got a late-night phone call. It was Timoner’s brother. He was calling to inform his sister that he and his family, as well as Timoner’s 21-year-old son Joaquim and their 86-year-old mother, Lisa, had all evacuated to her home in Altadena.
“They all came to my house because the wind was barely even blowing there,” says Timoner. “They had all been evacuated from their Altadena homes. So, they got to my place, and my brother started making dinner. There was no evacuation order whatsoever, and then suddenly the power went off, and they saw flames, and everybody panicked and left.”
Timoner and Doctor were alarmed by the call on Jan. 7 but got on their scheduled flight to Budapest the following day. They were traveling to Hungary to interview a Holocaust survivor. When they arrived, Timoner received a text from her neighbor informing her that her Altadena home had burned to the ground.
Popular on Variety
The Altadena home of Ondi Timoner and her wife Morgan Doctor burned to the ground, but Timoner’s late father’s bathrobe inexplicably didn’t burn.
Timoner’s brother, thinking that her home would stay intact, grabbed a few hard drives from the director’s desk. The hard drives contained raw footage from two documentaries that Timoner is currently working on: “All That We Are,” about filmmaker Lesley Paterson and her late husband, “All Quiet on the Western Front” screenwriter Simon Marshall; and a doc for Legendary about the Nazis. Her brother also grabbed the assets to Timoner’s “All God’s Children,” about the escalating tensions between Jewish and Black Brooklynites, which premiered at DOC NYC in November.
Other than that, the two-time Sundance grand jury prize winner, Timoner, known for docus like “DIG!,” “We Live in Public,” and “Last Flight Home,” lost all of her physical possessions, including her film equipment and hard drives containing footage from past films as well as cash, jewelry, valuable paintings, and her son’s artwork. The director also lost extensive research she had been gathering for a screenplay she is writing about her late father, Eli Timoner, and the company he founded in 1972 called Air Florida.
“All the original articles that my mom had put together through the seventies and eighties about my father’s company – it’s all gone,” says Timoner. “There was a huge bin of research and all my dad’s writing, all his original letters, and all of my parents’ love letters to each other, which I had tied together in a ribbon – it’s all gone.”
Doctor, a musician, adds, “The problem is that we not only lived in our house, we also both worked there. I lost every instrument that I had and all my recording gear. Ondi lost all her cameras, her lenses, her computer, and her equipment. So it has been incredibly debilitating because it’s like if we lost our house, but if we still had an office somewhere else, that would be much more manageable. Rebuilding literally everything is daunting.”
“My town is gone,” adds Timoner. “Both my banks, my post office, our favorite restaurant, Fox’s, our pet store, our hardware store, all my neighbors’ houses are gone. So, our whole way of life has gone. It’s like death on so many levels. It’s such a crazy radical lesson in impermanence that I have to just kind of embrace right now on some level.”
Timoner bought the Altadena home in 2011. Before moving in, she remodeled the living room and the dining room. After MTV Documentary Films bought her 2022 “Last Flight Home,” which premiered at Sundance, Timoner renovated the kitchen. (“Last Flight Home” intimately chronicles the last 15 days of Eli Timoner’s life before he died via California’s End of Life Option Act in 2021.)
“It was a really beautiful, gorgeous house,” says Timoner. “People came over, and anybody who came just wanted to be there. We had these incredible outdoor screenings and community parties. It was like paradise. The wifi code was “Resort5g.”
Everything in the home, including a safe deposit box that was supposed to be fire-resistant, burned. The only object that remained was Timoner’s late father’s favorite cotton robe, which he wore throughout the director’s childhood. It was found hanging on a hook on a bathroom door.
“It was his favorite robe,” says Timoner. “Everything else in the bathroom is gone except the tile wall. The entire house is crumbled around it. I feel like it’s sending me a message. I guess he’s watching over us. I’m not a religious person, and I’m a little skeptical about all that kind of stuff, but how is it possible that a cotton robe is the only untouched thing in the house?”
For now, Timoner and Doctor have moved into Annette Bening and Warren Beatty’s guest house. Bening and Timoner met when her fictional film “Mapplethorpe” was released in 2018.
“So many friends of mine, like Annette and Warren, have been beyond generous,” Timoner says. Recently, doc filmmaker Liz Garbus (“What Happened, Miss Simone?”) and producer Dan Cogan (“Icarus”) gave the couple duffle bags of clothing.
“I am one the luckiest unlucky people out there,” she acknowledges.
Following their shoot in Budapest, Timoner and Doctor went to New York City for media obligations for “All God’s Children” and “DIG! XX,” a 20th anniversary extended edition of “DIG!”
“I just stayed the course,” says Timoner. “That was my way of coping. The National Guard had blocked off our neighborhood, so there was no way to go back to my home.”
Timoner and Doctor returned to L.A. on last week, and now plan to relocate to New York City in March.
Timoner will be at Sundance this week for private screenings of “All God’s Children” and her latest film “The Inn Between,” about a hospice care center in Utah for the homeless.
To help Timoner and her family, actress Tara Subkoff set up a GoFundMe.