Filmed during the Covid days of 2021, a few weeks before the death of Eli Timoner, a former aviation boss, Last Flight Home is her most daring film yet.
Her father was the former owner of Air Florida and a hugely admired member of the Greater Miami Jewish Federation. But his career came to a halt in 1983 when a stroke left him paralysed on the left side of his body, aged 53.
It didn’t stop him from living a happy and fulfilling life surrounded by his children, director Ondi, acclaimed social justice and LGBT activist Rachel and TV and film producer David. In 2021, after being admitted to hospital with breathing difficulties, Eli made the decision to end his own life under California’s End of Life Option Act.
Last Flight Home is a deeply moving account of love and familial intimacy. Speaking in London last month, Timoner tells me that she didn’t realise the healing power of the footage she had filmed during those days until she was editing it.
“My father was the most extraordinary human being any of us in our family had ever met, or anyone who knew him had ever met. He was so generous of spirit and graceful in his suffering, all those many, many years that he was paralysed, and then his status and money… sort fell away. He was always cheering the rest of us on and, in a way, I think he really survived by living through us and rooting us on.
“So being able to share him, first and foremost, was a big motivating factor. But I had no intention of making it a public film when I started filming. I set up cameras just because I wanted to bottle him up and not forget his voice and his personality.”
“We were not raised very religious,” she tells me, adding, “my mother converted because she wanted us to be raised Jewish. She loved the rituals, but also more than anything, she wanted to make sure that we were with the underdog. She would say when everybody asked her why did you convert?
"She’d say one word, ‘Hitler’. She wanted to make sure that we identified with the Jewish side of the family. And so we are all batmitzvahed and barmitzvahed, but we were not temple-going people all the time.”
Her sister Rachel went on to become a rabbi, and officiated at the marriage of Ondi and her wife composer Morgan Doctor during Telluride Film Festival earlier this year.
“My sister had a calling later in life and my father wasn’t against her becoming a rabbi, but she was such a significant social and political activist, that it was more, I think, for all of us — we just didn’t want her to stop fighting for all of the downtrodden and all of the injustice in the world,” says Timoner.
The film takes place during the few weeks before her father’s death.
He is seen taking his time saying his goodbyes to family and friends via numerous Zoom calls from his sickbed, while surrounded by his nearest and dearest.
It soon transpires what a truly extraordinary and selfless person he continued to be after everything he lost. I wonder how difficult it was for Ondi to share those intimate moments with the world.
“You know, I couldn’t take away my father’s suffering,” she says, “and it was excruciating, like, thank God, we had those days and those weeks at the end of his life, to try to prove to him that he was not a failure, and that he had, in fact, provided us with everything. But what I could do by sharing this was help other people with their suffering.
“And for my father’s legacy to be that, is far more important than any kind of urges I have towards my own privacy.
“I’m not losing the intimacy of those moments by sharing with you. I had those moments and it was the most sacred and beautiful space I’ve ever been in in my life to be in my parents’ living room.”
For all our medical and technical advances as a society, death remains taboo for most of us.
The process of dying is seldom spoken of openly and by allowing us to accept that it can be just as natural as that of being born, getting married or having children, Timoner has more than done her father proud.
She has given him one last chance to showcase his philosophies as well as his disarming quirks, thanks to the many candid moments captured by her film.
“My sister said that to her the power of the film is in seeing a family turn together towards death, and face it, and what life-affirming good can come of that. That by looking at death, and knowing that you’re going to die and actually facing it and saying, you know what, we’re all going to die.
“And we’re going to lose our parents before that. And if things go the way they should, as opposed to them burying us. If we look at the finite time we have on this planet, and we approach it, you know, with open hearts and minds, it only makes our life richer. You know, it’s our fear of death that actually changes our lives.”
Having gone through such a life-changing experience alongside her family, Timoner is now a huge believer that every human should be allowed to live and die with dignity and respect. It is first and foremost this message that she endeavours to deliver through her deeply moving film.
“I think we should have the right to die with dignity.
“That’s what I wanted to get to, we must change the law.
“Yeah, it’s a basic human right and we had no idea this law existed, thank God that it existed in California. My dad when he was begging us to help him die, he just meant ‘help me die’, he didn’t know that there was a law.”
Last Flight Home is on general release from today
