A change in Californian law allowed Eli Timoner to end his own life. The founder of Air Florida was in his early 90s, paralysed and in pain. He wanted to die on his own terms. His daughter, documentary maker Ondi Timoner, recorded his final 15 days in her new documentary, Last Flight Home (released in the US by MTV Documentary Films).
The intimate, deeply personal film has emerged as an awards front runner. It has already won the DOC NYC prize for Observational Filmmaking.
Timoner, whose previous feature docs include Dig! (about rock group The Brian Jonestown Massacre) and Library Of Dust (about deceased patients at a mental hospital) has been travelling back and forth across the Atlantic to support the awards campaign. “Three times in a month,” she says of a schedule which has taken her to BAFTA in London and IDFA in Amsterdam, among other ports of call.
When the director was nine and a half, her father had a massive stroke after his neck was manipulated during a massage. He had been a fit, successful businessman, running his own airline. All of a sudden, he was paralysed. Timoner can’t picture him before this incident. She knows she used to play tennis and go jogging with him but has no memories of doing so. “It’s all from photographs,” she says.
Early in the pandemic, Eli had been taken to hospital with breathing difficulties. “It was so sudden, so unexpected that he was going to the hospital that morning. He thought he was going to die in the hospital and that he was never going to come out. He was sounding so desperate. He was even saying the “Shema,” a prayer one says at the end of one’s life in Judaism, the final prayer.”
Worried she was about to lose him, Timoner quickly started recording his phone calls. “I didn’t want to forget the gravelly sound of his voice. But when my brother found out there was this end of life option act in California and that we were going to be able to bring him home, I thought I have to film him, I have to interview him,…I have to record his final moments on earth.”
At this stage, there was no intention of making a film out of the footage of her father’s final days. She had previously written a dramatic screenplay about him which she still hopes to shoot one day, but a documentary wasn’t even on her mind.
The director had long believed her father was the perfect subject for a movie. Eli Timoner led an extraordinary life. He was a businessman and philanthropist who had launched low cost airline Air Florida in 1971 as a family business. He had been able to grow the airline because of his “innovative” and rule-breaking approach as well as his kindness and concern for his staff. After he was paralysed, he was ousted from his own company and endured some brutal years.
“My father was always my favourite leading man. He was always my favourite impossible visionary,” Timoner says. However, her intention had always been to make a film about his life, not one about his death.
Last Flight Home has a strange resemblance to Frank Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life. Like the character played by James Stewart in Frank Capra’s classic movie, Eli felt “so miserable about himself, such a failure.” Even late in his life, he was remorseful about falling into debt after he was paralysed and not providing for his family in the way he had wanted. However, in the 15 days that the documentary chronicles, he realised how many friends he has and how many lives he had touched.
“Dad gave us everything when he thinks he gave us nothing,” Timoner says of him. She was desperate to make sure he knew this before it was too late.
When the director told her father about her plans to film his final days, he gave her his blessing, telling her that he “instinctively knew she was on the right track.”
As the family prepared for Eli’s death, no-one realised that Ondi was making a movie. They were dressed in clothes that they hadn’t changed for days or had their hair in rollers. “They’re used to me filming everything. If you asked them and they were sitting here, they would say: ‘we thought it was Ondi being Ondi.’”
Timoner’s sister Rachel, who is a Rabbi, was the “most resistant” member of the family to the cameras, but realised that her father was happy to be filmed and that her mother wanted a record of her husband.
“I just wanted to have him captured somehow. I wanted to bottle him up,” Timoner explains her initial motivations for filming. “I wasn’t going to re-live the death of dad. I’ve been a filmmaker for so many years now…shooting life as it is unfolding is what I have been doing for 30 years…I think that is how I survive. I knew dad would not be completely gone if I filmed it right.”
At first, she had no intention even to edit the footage. Then her sister asked her to make a short memorial video. That’s when she began to shape the footage and realised its richness.
As an independent filmmaker, Timoner was able to “clear her schedule.” It was the Covid period and she didn’t have a production planned. She therefore devoted herself to being with her father – and to making the memorial video. This was originally intended to be five minutes long but her first cut was 32 minutes.
“Here I was, seeing person after person, coming into that room or getting onto Zoom [with Eli], and they’re all grappling with these massive issues of life and death because they’re facing a man who is going to die,” Timoner says of the many encounters her father had with friends and family members in the 15 days leading up to his death. “He, although he is the one dying, is comforting them or making them laugh.”
Since Eli’s death, Timoner’s mother has watched the film constantly.
Timoner’s film, meanwhile, sparked a bidding war in Sundance. She eventually decided to go with MTV rather than with one of the bigger streamers. Sheila Nevins, the legendary producer and head of [Paramount-owned] MTV Documentary, was so passionate and lobbied so hard to acquire the film that Timoner made the deal.
The director knows that a film about death is a hard sell for audiences. MTV, though, has been emphasising the humour and humanity in Last Flight Home. “I just felt like what they’re doing now in making sure as many people as possible see it is what was needed,” Timoner says of a documentary which has been receiving rave reviews wherever it has screened.
