If there’s a unifying element to the documentaries that Pasadena-based Ondi Timoner has been directing for the past three decades, it’s her enduring fascination with confidently delusional men: entrepreneurs, cult leaders, visionaries, rock stars. Think Anton Newcombe, the Brian Jonestown Massacre frontman and truculent protagonist of “Dig!” or Josh Harris, the dot-com futurist profiled in “We Live in Public.”
But her newest film, the intimate and unflinching “Last Flight Home,” takes a different tack.
To make it, she recorded the final days of her father, Eli Timoner, who exercised California’s End of Life Option Act and died in early 2021. In doing so, Timoner learned that “it’s possible to make a movie about a beautiful human being who’s incredibly graceful and dignified and smart and doesn’t have a dark side.”
That’s not to say the film is without tension. The documentary depicts the many obstacles that impede a humane approach to death, from the overwhelming bureaucratic legwork to the physical difficulties associated with end-of-life care.
Speaking over lunch near her home last month, Timoner says that the documentary footage stemmed from “this desperate feeling that I needed to capture my father, but it wasn’t intended for public consumption.”
As the extended family gathered in her parents’ Pasadena home, Ondi set up cameras and kept them running. “I just document everything all the time,” she says. “My family, therefore, is very used to being documented by me, so they didn’t think the multi-camera setup was really anything.”
She also spoke to a therapist “to see if I was trying to hide from something or mediate my relationship to his dying, and she actually, to my surprise, said: ‘If you feel like you need to film, you should film.’”
What transpires over the course of two weeks is a series of heartfelt conversations, goodbyes over video calls, secret-sharing and tears. We learn the story of Eli’s success as the owner of a Florida airline company and then of his financial collapse after a stroke in his early 50s left him partially paralyzed.
“He faced the whole thing so courageously and with such grace,” Timoner says. “It was like having agency over his body for the first time in 40 years. His sense of humor came back. And it allowed us closure.”
There may be no such thing as a good death, but the 92-year-old Eli ends his life surrounded by unconditional family love, expert caretakers, a few happy surprises and a sense of bodily autonomy. He makes his decision with a sound mind and never wavers in his conviction.
Ondi Timoner with her father, Eli Timoner, in the documentary “Last Flight Home.”
(MTV Documentary Films)
After Eli’s death, Ondi’s sister asked her to compile the footage into a five-minute memorial video. “I stood up a week later with a 32-minute video,” Ondi says. “It felt like Dad was alive inside the editing system, and I realized that of everybody who came into that room, nobody left unchanged. I went from grieving daughter to filmmaker during the week of making that video.”
She then spent more time with the footage and was eventually able to convince her sister that there was merit in sharing the film with the world. Timoner knew that “Last Flight Home” had a potential resonance well beyond the circle of those who loved her father. “I did want it to be like a how-to guide,” Timoner says.
“When I made ‘Dig,’ I was touched by how many people became artists or started bands because of it. But this is about how we all lose our loved ones and our own lives. We have very few healthy road maps for that. And the film really provides one.”
California is one of only a handful of states that offer the option of medical aid in dying, and the process can be onerous. It’s also a cause that doesn’t have many champions, “because death and dying is something we humans avoid as much as possible,” Timoner says.
“My films don’t usually turn me into an activist,” she adds. “But terminally ill people can’t fight for the cause, because they’re fighting for their lives or trying to make peace with the fact that they’re going to die. I think about the legacy of my father and how lucky we were as a family to have a heightened experience of togetherness because of his ability to make this choice. And I need to pay it forward.”
Timoner has launched an impact campaign to try to bring this right to millions of other terminally ill people. But she also isn’t done telling Eli’s story. She’s working on a scripted film about her dad, focusing on the golden age of aviation and his creation of the fastest-growing airline in history with Air Florida.
For Timoner, the impulse to film her father’s final days is the same one that’s inspiring a potential feature film about his life. “I feel like there’s a really deep fear in me of forgetting,” she says. “It has motivated my entire career.”