{"id":123840,"date":"2025-09-01T01:11:08","date_gmt":"2025-09-01T01:11:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/123840\/"},"modified":"2025-09-01T01:11:08","modified_gmt":"2025-09-01T01:11:08","slug":"ondi-timoners-altadena-fire-short-all-the-walls-came-down","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/123840\/","title":{"rendered":"Ondi Timoner’s Altadena Fire Short All the Walls Came Down"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ondi Timoner<\/a> doesn\u2019t sit around. She was prepping a documentary feature about the Nazis in Budapest when she found out her house of 14 years had burned down in the Altadena fire. And she kept on shooting.<\/a> Now more than ever she realizes that home is her work. And sure enough, when she got back to Altadena and started to deal with the myriad of things (insurance, rebuilding), she kept recording her life. It\u2019s who she is.<\/p>\n

She wasn\u2019t really finished with her latest short, \u201cAll the Walls Came Down<\/a>,\u201d when we talked on Zoom from her new digs in Joshua Tree. \u201cEven though everything I\u2019ve created, most of my archives are gone, I can still go and make something else now that\u2019s new,\u201d she said. \u201cI do take refuge in the stories I\u2019m telling, they helped me to order the chaos, and to find the silver lining. When I\u2019m dealing with trauma, I record it, so I could, one day, possibly make something, make lemonade out of lemons. If I don\u2019t record and have the matter with which to practice that form of alchemy, there\u2019s not even an option. So I\u2019m lucky enough that I have friends who have cameras, and I had with me a couple of cameras. I lost so many cameras, like lenses and tripods and all my lighting, but I had a couple cameras in my suitcase because I was in Europe.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"'Father<\/a> \"Jude<\/a> <\/p>\n

Timoner shocked herself with the speed of the edit. \u201cI truly have never edited anything so fast,\u201d she said. \u201cIt just came flying out. It shocked my whole team.\u201d She submitted the short late, way past the deadline, but festival director Julie Huntsinger accepted it anyway. Now Timoner is rushing to finish it in time. \u201cAll the Walls Came Down\u201d premieres Sunday. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The toughest moment for Timoner was landing in LA and not being able to go home. \u201cI was in a real state,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd it was tough, but I knew to film<\/a> because of \u2018Last Flight Home.\u2019<\/a>\u201d That film was an intimate (and healing) family chronicle of her father\u2019s death by euthanasia. <\/p>\n

Timoner started filming her razed home as well as her brother\u2019s, and reached out to her neighbors. \u201cHere we are all in this pile,\u201d she said, \u201cand I\u2019m processing, trying to make sense of the whole thing. What is all of this going to come to? And what is this about? What can I learn about this as somebody right in the middle of it, going through it myself, that I can share with other people?\u201d<\/p>\n

As we talk, Timoner realizes that she wants to add the last picture she ever took in the house. She\u2019s still fussing with the edit. \u201cMany of us are going to have to deal with this [climate crisis] on some level,\u201d she said, \u201cwhether it\u2019s floods or fire or earthquake. The climate is not happy.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Timoner talked to her neighbors she recognized that she was coming from a relative place of privilege. \u201cWe\u2019re all under-insured,\u201d she said. \u201cThey still haven\u2019t paid me to my property limits, even though I lost literally all the property that I insured. They also owe us money for rent. They haven\u2019t paid any of it. The reality is, I\u2019m a working director who has made films that people care about, at least to an extent, that I can survive right now.\u201d<\/p>\n

Altadena resident and activist Heavenly Hughes of My Tribe Rise told Timoner: \u201cYou moved into a Black community, we\u2019re not a priority.\u201d Timoner was shocked. \u201cI felt such white blindness,\u201dshe said. \u201cHow naive I am to think that because I pay my taxes, I expect a fire truck, emergency services, at least, to evacuate my neighbors and my community, but there was nothing. And now it\u2019s been proven.\u201d<\/p>\n

Timoner\u2019s West Altadena neighborhood didn\u2019t get fire trucks. Her mother\u2019s closer to downtown did.<\/p>\n

So Timoner started filming her neighbors. \u201cEveryone has different circumstances, even if we live in the same spot, even if we\u2019re walking our dogs down the same street and loving the same peacocks and loving the same town,\u201d she said. \u201cWe shared a deep love for Altadena. When the title of the film came to me, is that the walls came down and these relationships have blossomed, just like the grass that\u2019s springing out of the ground, despite all of this, you\u2019ll see fresh growth. The garden we\u2019re creating, it\u2019s a community determined to maintain its integrity in the face of a massive move toward gentrification. This land is very valuable.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u201cAll the Walls Came Down\u201d shows that all insurance is not created equal. One family in the film was about to lose everything, but Heavenly Hughes and others are fighting back. \u201cThere are people living in their cars, who were not homeless,\u201d said Timoner. \u201cThere are people who have lived there for decades and decades, who have lost all of their generational wealth, and they need help right now. It\u2019s an urgent situation, and it\u2019s something that we read in the news and such, but the power of film is to take audiences beneath the headlines, to actually meet the people who live there, who are going through whatever they\u2019re going through.\u201d<\/p>\n

Timoner is looking for a distributor, and will give any profits toward Altadena\u2019s recovery. The film will open at the Glendale Laemmle on September 12 for a qualifying run, complete with a birthday celebration for Hughes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ondi Timoner doesn\u2019t sit around. She was prepping a documentary feature about the Nazis in Budapest when she…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":123841,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[79318,88,11337,2695,5450,206,79319],"class_list":{"0":"post-123840","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-all-the-walls-came-down","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-festivals","11":"tag-film","12":"tag-interviews","13":"tag-movies","14":"tag-ondi-timoner"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123840","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=123840"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123840\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/123841"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=123840"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=123840"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=123840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}