‘Last Flight Home’: Filmmaker Ondi Timoner Documents Her Ailing Father’s Wish To Go Out On His Own Terms

deadline.com:

Towards the end of his life, when Eli Timoner’s weakened body was failing him, he called his daughter, the filmmaker Ondi Timoner, and told her he was ready to go. “If they can give me goodbye powder, I’d take it,” he said. “I just want to be in the ground.” He pleaded with Ondi, “Help me go there and end all this agony.” As a resident of California, Timoner could avail himself of the state’s End of Life Option Act, a law that “allows a terminally-ill adult… to request a drug from his or her physician that will end his or her life,” as the UCLA Health website describes it. “People who choose to end their lives this way, and who carefully follow the steps in the law, will not be considered to have committed suicide.” The state reported that 486 people took life-ending drugs under these circumstances in 2021.

Eli Timoner was one of them. Ondi Timoner’s new film, Last Flight Home, offers a remarkably intimate view of the last few weeks of her father’s life as he carried out his wishes with the support of his family – his wife Lisa, and their children Rachel, Ondi and David.

Ondi’s camera recorded as family and friends gathered around Eli, who was alert but debilitated in a hospital bed set up in the living room of his home.

It was Ondi’s impulse to film, yet one she questioned. “I, personally, was worried that I was trying to mediate my experience or that I was going to be hurting my family’s experience,” Timoner tells Deadline. “So I went to see this consultant therapist-type person and said, ‘I feel like I have to film and I don’t know what to do and is this a bad idea?’ And she said, ‘No.