In All the Walls Came Down, filmmaker Ondi Timoner visits the ruins of her home after it burned down in the Altadena fire in January 2025 and follows the building of community that occurs as her neighbors try to pick up and figure out how to move forward after they’ve lost everything.
Awards Buzz spoke with Timoner about her decision to pick up a camera and film this very vulnerable moment in her life:
“I didn’t what I would do personally, I didn’t know what we’d do as a family, where we would live or what we would do. But one thing I knew was that, in the past, filmmaking has helped me. Just rolling camera has given me material with which to transform horrible and terrifying experience, like the death of my father for example, into something that could be helpful and that actually really ends up healing me as well. I had that experience with Last Flight Home, and so a few friends, people in the business, they would say, a lot of cinematographers reached out and said, ‘Hey, if you want to film, I’ll be there for you.’ And I thought, ‘film?’ It was the first thought I had of like, oh my gosh, a reminder of like, oh yeah, that’s one thing I probably could do. And then I started to feel responsibility as friends reached out and said, ‘you are going to film this, right?’ And I thought, gosh, the last thing I’m going to do is make a film about my house burning down. That’s just not a film I’m going to make.”
“But if I don’t film when I go home to the ruins of it or, not home, but like to the lack of a home, then I won’t have anything to start in case there’s a story to tell. The structure of the film is really interesting and different than any film I’ve made where it goes from ground zero if you will, the pebble in the pond is my story and inside a prayer I made years ago about, with a health scare, burn everything – I actually said that! I was going into a death-defying health scare MRI situation and to then the ruins of my home to then the neighbors to then my brother. And then we meet Heavenly Hughes and My TRIBE Rise and we start seeing the community come together and that’s really where, to me, the title of the film came from, the meaning of the film is the community, the silver lining if you will, of the whole thing and that made it worth making a film. So I’m really using my story in a way of grief and trauma and loss and confusion to get to the bigger more important story, I think, of the community.”
Watch the video above to hear her take on the distance between capturing events and when they happened and how it feels to once again be such a party of one of her films.
All the Walls Came Down is on the Oscar shortlist for Best Documentary Short and is able to watch via The Los Angeles Times.
