ALL GOD'S CHILDREN

Ondi Timoner is known to be one of the greatest talents in non-fiction filmmaking. She often takes on the stories of people pushing the boundaries, visionaries fighting against all odds, with a gripping and unique narrative style.

Ondi has the rare distinction of winning the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival twice - for her documentaries DIG! (2004) and WE LIVE IN PUBLIC (2009). Both films were acquired by MoMA NY for its permanent collection. In 2022, Ondi was Shortlisted for the Oscar, Nominated for the Emmy for Exceptional Merit and the WGA Award for Best Documentary, and awarded the lifetime achievements for Excellence in Observational FIlmmaking from DocNYC and The Humanitas Award for her film LAST FLIGHT HOME. Other award-winning documentary features include: THE NATURE OF THE BEAST (1994), JOIN US (2007), COOL IT (2010), BRAND: A SECOND COMING (2015) & COMING CLEAN (2020). Timoner has also directed countless award-winning shorts, among them “Library of Dust” in 2011, “Amanda Palmer on the Rocks” in 2014 and “The Last Mile” in 2015.
In the scripted arena, Ondi wrote, directed, produced and edited the scripted film, MAPPLETHORPE, starring Matt Smith, which was officially selected for Sundance 2018 but premiered at Tribeca FF where it won an Audience Award. It then garnered many more Audience and Best Narrative Feature awards and was released theatrically by Samuel Goldwyn in 2019. The more complete, original “MAPPLETHORPE The Director’s Cut” was released in 2021.
LAST FLIGHT HOME, which premiered at Sundance and Telluride in 2022 and was released theatrically by MTV Documentary, is Timoner’s most personal film, which portrays the last 15 days of her father Eli’s life, as she and her close-knit family prepare for him to make his final transition via medical aid in dying.nIn this Emmy-nominated, Oscar-shortlisted film, we discover an extraordinary life, one filled with wild achievements, tragic loss and, above all, enduring love. Ondi shares an unforgettable and stunning verité account of a family courageously, and joyously, facing both life and death. She is currently polishing a screenplay, also entitled LAST FLIGHT HOME, which she has been developing for a decade about the remarkable life and career of her father, Eli Timoner, who founded the fastest growing airline in the history of the world before suffering an accidental stroke and living the next forty years as a hemiplegic.
Ondi’s most recent film, “THE NEW AMERICANS: Gaming a Revolution”, which premiered at SXSW in 2023 and was picked up by Paramount, is a visceral journey into the intersection of finance, media and extremism which uncovers the explosive and irreversible ramifications of our digital future. Timoner sees it as a continuation of her look at the impact of the Internet twelve years after her seminal film WE LIVE IN PUBLIC.
For television, Timoner created, executive-produced and directed the critically-acclaimed 10-hour nonfiction series JUNGLETOWN for Viceland about a group of young adults in the Panamanian jungle determined to build “the world's most sustainable town,” and SOUND AFFECTS, a series about music’s effect on people’s lives for VH1. Ondi was nominated for a Grammy for Best Long Form Music Video for an EPK she directed about the band Fastball in 1999. She’s also produced and directed music videos for The Dandy Warhols, The Vines, Paul Westerberg, Lucinda Williams, Vanessa Carlton, The Jonas Brothers, and Run DMC, among others.
Ondi is currently developing a documentary called THE INN BETWEEN, which is an intimate, all-access look into the only hospice and recuperative care facility for the homeless in America, also called “The INN Between.” By meeting the unsheltered in an elevated place, where their basic human needs are being met and they have found community, our film moves audiences beyond their unconscious bias, and allows them to see the homeless as tender human beings, who could be their own relatives. The film hopes to provide a model for other cities to follow by demonstrating that facilities like The INN Between work to lower the impact of the homeless on the health care system, while giving the residents a place to either recuperate or die in a warm bed, with care and attention. Several subjects came in on hospice with weeks to live and are now recovered, employed, tax-paying citizens.
She is also currently directing ALL GOD’S CHILDREN, which follows Rabbi Rachel Timoner, a reform rabbi and political activist, and Reverend Dr. Robert Waterman, a black baptist reverend and community leader, for several years as they bring their respective congregations, Congregation Beth Elohim and Antioch Baptist Church, together in an ambitious attempt to combat the entrenched racism and anti-semitism that plagues their communities in Brooklyn.
Timoner has also enjoyed a career in front of the camera, interviewing filmmakers and innovators across tech and government as well for a number of shows. From 2011-2016, she created and hosted BYOD (Bring Your Own Doc) for thelip.tv producing over 300 episodes of unique interviews she performed with top documentary filmmakers around the world. From 2012-2017, she founded and produced A TOTAL DISRUPTION, an online network dedicated to telling the stories of entrepreneurs & artists who are using technology to innovate new ways to live. Subjects included graphic artist Shepard Fairey, comedian Russell Brand, musician Moby, Twitter-founder Jack Dorsey, Instagram-founder Kevin Systrom, Linked In founder Reid Hoffman, and the late founder of Zappos, Tony Hsieh. Ondi has released two masterclasses for filmmakers, “How to Make a Great Documentary (In My Opinion)” and “Lean Content” with best-selling author Eric Ries. From 2018-2020, Ondi produced & hosted WeTalk, a traveling talk show about the women shaping our culture with the mission of taking #MeToo to #WeDo. Timoner gave a popular TEDxKC talk entitled “When Genius and Insanity Hold Hands” in 2014, explaining why she tells the stories of what she calls “impossible visionaries.”
Ondi Timoner serves as the Chair of Nonfiction for Special Projects at the DGA, and is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, the WGA, the International Documentary Association, Film Fatales and Women in Film.