Ondi Timoner on “The INN between” and personal tragedy

Ondi recently lost her home in the heartbreaking devastation of the California wildfires in Altadena, just months after premiering. 

THE INN BETWEEN, which invites audiences into the only hospice for the homeless in America, where miracles happen. The film showcases the unique community and care provided at the hospice, shedding light on the unexpected nature of homelessness and offering a potential solution to the pervasive issue. 

Ondi hopes that the documentary will raise awareness and inspire mayors and community leaders everywhere to consider implementing similar facilities in their towns, ultimately reducing homelessness and providing better care for the least fortunate in our society. 

Ondi had an appearance planned on ABC News about the film for months but ironically lost her home just a few days before the scheduled date. You can see the full interview here.

Ondi Timoner

‘All God’s Children’ Review: A Brooklyn Synagogue and a Church Seeking Unity Offer an Edifying Parable for Our Time

“An edifying parable for our time… Consequential and instructive.”

“With All God’s Children, Timoner gives her older sister an affirming but unsentimental close-up.”

“It’s hard to imagine that any of these participants would have felt as deeply about each other were it not for confronting those missteps. There’s a lesson in that, and the film makes a persuasive case that at least two Brooklyn congregations and their leaders, have a great deal of practical wisdom to share.”

Ondi Timoner

All God’s Children Review: Peace, Love, and Misunderstanding

“All God’s Children offers an important tool for community building, especially with four more years of Trump ahead.”

“[All God’s Children] echoes the sentiment that struck many viewers in Vice President Harris’s eloquent concession speech: it’s only when it’s darkest that one sees the stars. [The film] is a portrait of what it means to reach for the stars—and remember that the multitude of stars shining ultimately brightens the sky.”

“Viewers should emerge enlightened and ready to listen.”

“[The] scenes are complicated reminders of the importance of nuance, empathy, curiosity, and keeping your ears and heart open.”

“It’s a productive reminder that people can work through their misunderstandings with respect and a willingness to grow from their mistakes.”

“Timoner’s fly-on-the-wall approach invites a viewer to be an active listener in these conversations.

Ondi Timoner

All God’s Children’ Review: Ondi Timoner Captures A Turbulent But Inspiring Story Of Interfaith Harmony In Gentrified Brooklyn – DOC NYC

“Thoughtful and Powerful… Ondi Timoner captures a turbulent but inspiring story— this film gives us hope.”

“[An] inspiring story of interfaith harmony in gentrified Brooklyn.”

“In the 20 years since her breakout film Dig!... Ondi Timoner has positioned herself as a great explorer of the times we live in, usually while that history is still unfolding.”

“All God’s Children is unusual in that, although it, too, is very much in and about the present moment, it’s a film that’s also in dialogue — thoughtfully, and powerfully — with the past.”

“Timoner’s film doesn’t shy away from the hard work that needs to go into making a dream such as this a reality.”

“[The film] hones in on a peculiar overlap in American society, drawing parallels between two seemingly chalk-and-cheese communities that have much more in common than they realize

Ondi Timoner

Woodstock Film Fest 2024 Review: Ondi Timoner Compassionately Chronicles a Hospice That Gives Residents a New Lease on Life in “The Inn Between”. The “Last Flight Home” director shines a light on a unique end-of-life facility that offers the unhoused a chance to die with dignity.

Typically Ondi Timoner works with a bigger canvas than she does in “The Inn Between,” with the director of the decade-spanning “Dig!” and the globe-trotting “Cool It” spending a mere four seasons at the Salt Lake City-based hospice of the title which was founded as the only care facility of its kind to offer end-of-life and recuperative care to the unhoused beginning in 2014.

At a concise 71 minutes, it may be one of her smallest films in scale as she follows a handful of patients at the center, but when approaching people with an unusually open heart and mind has always been a part of her gift for filmmaking, the film also feels like one of her most expansive as it becomes a moving survey of a collection of people expecting their days to be numbered upon entering after difficult lives on the street and revived at least in a spiritual sense when treated with dignity.

Ondi Timoner

20 Years After ‘DIG!’ Revitalized rOCK docs, Ondi & David Timoner Add More Chaos & Context To A Sundance Classic - The Deadline Q&A
Dig!, a documentary about two bands – The Brian Jonestown Massacre and The Dandy Warhols – is a musical trainwreck, equal parts romantic comedy and horror film that follows the highs and lows of being a musician, in the studio, on the road and in their own heads.

The film, which launched at Sundance in 2004 and is returning to the festival this year with an extended cut, is a favorite among the musical class. I’ve sat in countless tour vans and crappy motels where it’s watched, quoted and dissected by kids with a dream and a drumkit.

Ondi Timoner

Ondi Timoner Talks About Her Digital Future Doc ‘The New Americans: Gaming a Revolution’ Ahead Of Netflix Debut; Watch Trailer Here

EXCLUSIVE: Timing is everything to documentary veteran Ondi Timoner, and the decision to launch her latest film in January, on New Year’s Day, is no coincidence. Premiered at SXSW in March, The New Americans: Gaming a Revolution is a fast and furious look at the post-Trump, post-Covid world we live in and the virtual spaces that have usurped the traditional norms of interaction and communication.

We have your first look at the film in the trailer above.

The New Americans: Gaming a Revolution deals with a lot of seemingly random issues and pulls them neatly together, notably the rise of the citizen stockbrokers, whose interventions caused havoc on Wall Street when they came to the aid of ailing video game store GameStop after it went public in 2021. This, and Donald Trump’s impromptu party at the Capitol the same year, set her thinking.

Ondi Timoner

Rock’n’roll Is Petty as Hell in This Music Documentary — and It’s Riveting

Ondi Timoner’s 2004 documentary Dig! is a masterful blend of everything there is to love about rock music. There is the superb songwriting and guitar playing of both The Brian Jonestown Massacre and The Dandy Warhols, two '90s bands that beautifully blended garage rock and psychedelics to create a unique sound. There’s the vain, petty, and even childish behavior of some of the band members, who obviously heard tales of rocker antics and sought to imitate them. There’s the fierce competitiveness and ferocious drive for success that many '90s bands pretended not to have, lest they seem too interested in commercialism. And finally, there is the frenemy relationship at the heart of the film between the two bands’ frontmen, which veers almost into reality TV territory. As we revisit this remarkably unique rock doc, we’ll see why its embrace of everything both wonderful and terrible about rock’n’roll makes it one of the all-time great music movies.

Ondi Timoner

Ondi Timoner documents her father’s intentional final days in “Last Flight Home”

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, Timoner 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.

Ondi Timoner

Everyone who loved my father understood his reasons to be done with this life on earth. He had been paralyzed for 40 years because of a stroke resulting from his neck being manipulated in a massage when he was only 53 years old. By 2021, he was 92 — weak, frail, battling terminal chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and falling a lot. He was tired of the fight. He would do anything for us, so how could we deny him his wish?

We found there was a law in California that would allow our father to take his own life with the help of medication after a 15-day waiting period, so we brought him home from the hospital to die on his own terms.

Ondi Timoner

SXSW: The New Americans: Gaming a Revolution

Directed by Ondi Timoner, The New Americans: A Gaming Revolution is a high-paced and engrossing documentary about our new age of finance and digital disruption. This subject matter can be difficult to understand especially for the uninitiated who are unfamiliar with r/Wallstreetbets, cryptocurrency, memes and TikTok. Even the chronically online, like myself, need a bit of guidance to understand this complex online world and all the jargon that goes with it. Timoner uses facets of internet culture to visually tell her story while also pausing throughout the movie to define specific words and phrases that need to be clarified in order for the current conversation happening on screen to be fully understood. This helps the viewer not get lost in the technicalities and enriches the film by providing both visual entertaining with information.

Ondi Timoner

‘The New Americans: Gaming a Revolution’ Review: A Heady Documentary Looks at How Stock Trading Turned Into a ‘Rebellious’ Addiction

In the history of casual comments that sound like they could mark the end of civilization, there’s a staggering contender in “The New Americans: Gaming a Revolution” — all the more so because it comes from an investor who sounds reasonably intelligent. The movie, the latest documentary provocation written and directed by Ondi Timoner (“Mapplethorpe,” “We Live in Public”), is about the new era of lone stock traders — many, though not all of them, millennials — who grew up playing video games and now experience investing at home as a literal extension of that thrill-a-minute world. The new trading apps, designed as visual candy, are meant to give you the rush that gamers get (and also the high that people seek out from slot machines). Trying to sum up the lizard-brain appeal of it all, an investor named Mitchell Hennessey explains, “Even if you lose on the trade, confetti pops up, and it almost feels like you’re leveling up. Even if you might have lost 50 percent.” So you’ve just lost half your money, but it still feels like you’re a winner. That’s called drinking the snake oil.

Ondi Timoner

‘The New Americans: Gaming A Revolution’ Review: Ondi Timoner’s Provocative Doc Previews The World That Awaits Us – SXSW

After last year’s Last Flight Home, an emotionally intense but beautifully calibrated meditation on her father’s right to medically assisted death, Timoner returns to her forte, which is an uncanny ability to intuit the vicissitudes of pop culture while embedding herself in it while it’s happening. With awards season now a year away, it’s hard to say whether the immediate relevance of The New Americans will make it last the course, given what just happened with Laura Poitras’ once sure-fire winner in the space of six months. But the world that Timoner uncovers here is not going to be changing any time soon.

How we’ll cope with all this is still anybody’s guess. But what’s comforting about this sometimes overwhelming barrage of information is that, as she always has been, Timoner is ahead of you and is just as alert and open to the questions that her film raises as you are. Plus the music is great.

Ondi Timoner

SXSW First Look: Director Ondi Timoner Digs Into GameStop Fiasco & The Internet’s Threat To Democracy In ‘The New Americans: Gaming A Revolution’ 

Oscar-shortlisted director Ondi Timoner was among the first documentary filmmakers to seriously examine the significance of the internet age, in her 2009 film We Live in Public.

The GameStop fiasco of 2021, in which day traders sent the stock market reeling by short-selling shares in the video game retailer, plays an integral role in the documentary.

The New Americans takes us on a wild meme-driven ride to meet the founders of Reddit and WallStreetBets, crypto fanatics, bored housewives, and TikTok-ers turned millionaire traders, in order to investigate the never-before-made connection between the GameStop squeeze and the Jan 6th Insurrection,” according to a description of the film. “Disruptive tropes can help a disenfranchised generation to rise up against corrupt power structures. But will algorithms amplify our worst impulses, threatening the very pillars of our democracy? The New Americans is a mem-ified punk rock manifesto that takes us inside the ‘revolution game’ to look at where we came from and where we’re headed on the precipice of this new era.”

Ondi Timoner

WallStreetBets Movie to Premiere at South by Southwest

WallStreetBets is heading to the big screen.

"The New Americans: Gaming a Revolution" will make its premiere next month at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas.

The 102-minute-long documentary film, directed by Ondi Timoner, lists WallStreetBets founder Jaime Rogozinski in its cast, as well as Jordan Belfort (the man whose financial crimes inspired Martin Scorsese's "The Wolf of Wall Street"), Anthony Scaramucci and ProTheDoge, the investor who made his name by going all-in on Dogecoin. Viewers will be in for a "wild meme-driven ride," the film's description says.

Ondi Timoner

THE NEW AMERICANS: GAMING A REVOLUTION WORLD PREMIERE AT SXSW Film and TV Festival

Among the films in the festival’s documentary spotlight section are James Adolphus’ “Being Mary Tyler Moore,” an exploration of how the television icon revolutionized depictions of women, and Ondi Timoner’s “The New Americans: Gaming a Revolution,” which pulls together threads of finance, media and political extremism in contemporary culture.

Ondi Timoner

Ondi Timoner Chronicles Her Father’s Quest for Dignified Death 

Ondi Timoner’s Sundance-debuting Last Flight Home is both a celebratory tribute to, and a shockingly intimate portrait of, a hardworking business and family man, whom adversity rendered a mensch. Indeed, the nonagenarian entrepreneur at the heart of this vérité doc — a Miami native who founded Air Florida, the fastest-growing airline in the world during the 1970s — was living an idyllic life until a neck cracking by a masseuse left the vibrant extrovert partially paralyzed at the age of 53. To compound the tragedy, this freak accident occurred before the 1990 passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, thus allowing the upstart air carrier to legally force out the man responsible for building it.

Ondi Timoner