Ondi Timoner recorded her 92-year-old father’s decline and assisted suicide for what became her documentary Last Flight Home. It might sound like the hardest possible film to make, but it wasn’t.
“I think it was probably the easiest film I’ve ever made, in a lot of ways, because it was so personally satisfying to make,” she says on the latest Actual Facts podcast. “It was something that was almost involuntary. I was grieving my father, and loving spending time with him, editing the film. and so sure I would cry. But he was so funny, so I would laugh and laugh and laugh.”
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Recording her father, Eli Timoner, came naturally, because she’s always filmed loved ones. He had no objection to the recordings, and editing them gave her a way to relive intimate talks with him, again and again.
“It was really a very interesting perspective on an event, a period of time that was so intense, where being his primary caregiver was my focus, and I set up cameras, really, as a way to survive,” Ondi Timoner says. “I didn’t have any intention of making a film. I was just wanting to bottle him up and not forget how he sounded and his personality, his inimitable personality.”
Ondi Timoner, Eli Timoner and Last Flight Home
Last Flight Home captures the final weeks of Eli Timoner’s life after he decides to end it under California’s End of Life Option Act. The film offers a profoundly intimate portrayal of love, loss, and the courage it takes to say goodbye.
Ondi Timoner has twice won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, first for her 2004 documentary Dig, and again for 2009’s We Live in Public. Both films are now part of the permanent collection of New York City’s Museum of Modern Art.
Eli Timoner was a visionary entrepreneur who founded Air Florida in the 1970s, and became known for his generous philanthropy. But he was forced from the job by his own board of director after a stroke in the early ’80s that left him paralyzed on his left side.
He lamented that he could no longer provide for his family as he once had. But what he lost in money, he made up in time. Ondi Timoner recalls the gift of having her father be more present for his family. And with Last Flight Home, she tried to make every moment last.
She captures both beautiful and difficult moments, including the bitter taste of one of the liquids he took to stop his heart.
“It was like walking on the moon, like we were just going through something that we had no idea how to do,” she says on the podcast. “We’d never been there before — losing our favorite person in the world, who had been the rock of our family.”
Last Flight Home, which premiered at Sundance and Telluride in 2022, was Oscar Shortlisted and received The Humanitas Award for Best Documentary. It was also nominated for the WGA Award for Best Documentary and for the Emmy for Exceptional Merit. You can read more about Ondi Timoner and Last Flight Home here.
Actual Facts, hosted by Eric Steuer, is a podcast dedicated to the creation of documentaries and what nonfiction storytelling tells us about ourselves. You can find details of this and other interviews on the MovieMaker site, or subscribe to Actual Facts at any podcasting platform you prefer.
Main image: The Timoner family in Last Flight Home. Courtesy of Ondi Timoner.