STORY AND PHOTO BY KAREN BOSSICK

When the Eaton fire ravaged vast neighborhoods in Los Angeles County a year ago Jan. 7-8, filmmaker Ondi Timoner was on a shoot in Europe. She returned to her “paradise” to find 19 people dead and 12,500 homes reduced to rubble, including hers.

To make sense of what had happened, she trained her camera lens on her community of Altadena, creating a 39-minute documentary about a community that has refused to disappear despite worthless reverse mortgages that threaten to push older residents off their land, neighbors fighting insurers and bankers and people forced to live in their cars.

“All the Walls Came Down” also depicts the community resilience that sprang up after the embers turned to ashes.

Ondi Timoner won the 2025 Sun Valley Film Festival Impact Award.

The film premiered at the 2025 Telluride Film Festival and was shown at the Sun Valley Film Festival in early December. It has been shortlisted for the Academy’s 98th Oscars Documentary Short Film Award, and the Los Angeles Times is releasing it on its documentary streaming platform this week.

Timoner talked about the film during the Sun Valley Film Festival with producer Chris Albert, who has promoted National Geographic films such as “Genius” at the festival.

“This film was born of fire. It came out of the ashes of Altadena Fire, in which our home burned to the ground, and it showed me the power of film,” said Timoner, whose previous documentaries visited the millennial-cult online world created by dotcom entrepreneur Josh Harris, rock bands and even her father’s assisted suicide in 2022’s “Last Flight Home,” available on Paramount+.

“This was chaos. This was utter desolation, unlike we’ve seen in this country,” she added.

Sun Valley Film Festival Director Candice Pate addresses an audience.

The Palisades and Eaton fires ignited within hours of each other. Santa Ana winds roared 90 miles per hour across grass and brush that were tinder dry after months with little or no rain.

The mostly Black and Brown community of Altadena never got the fire trucks that wealthier neighbors did.  And helicopters were grounded because of high winds.

“We’re not a priority,” Altadena activist Heavenly Hughes told Timoner.

Timoner was the first filmmaker to set boots on the ground following the fire, having gotten permission because of work she had done with National Geographic.

She, like countless others, had been told that there was no way the fire would get to her home. But, as the film opened, she found herself sifting through the ashes to find that her father’s 1970s polyester bathrobe had miraculously survived in the ruins of the bathroom, while a fireproof safe full of cash and her film awards had burnt to a crisp.

Over the next few months she filmed families who have been living in a Travelodge for months. Some have slept in caves in the San Gabriel Mountains; others in parks.

All were forced to start completely over, down to a spoon and a fork. Yet they insisted on sifting through the rubble in hopes of finding something they recognized.

“Even if it’s a mess, it’s still our stuff,” said one.

“Our lives are made of things we gather around us, and it matters,” Timoner’s sister Rabbi Rachel told her.

Despite the devastation, the community rallied. They held vigils for those lost. They held rallies, hoisting signs saying “Black Homes Matter” and “Altadena—Not for Sale.” They’ve appointed block captains, and they’re learning how to turn off one another’s gas because they realize they can’t count on the city, county or federal government.

“The message is we need to bring down the walls before a disaster,” said Timoner.

The film has a feeling of being unfinished because it is. Timoner is hoping those who see it will write a new chapter by supporting a Change.org petition to stop foreclosures. New Yorkers who saw the film wrote letters in support of Altadena.

And a music video by vocalist Chantal Kreviazuk is helping to bring the story to a wider audience.

The Sun Valley Film Festival gave it the festival’s second annual Impact Award for the impact it is having.

“The walls may have come down, but the community is still standing,” said Timoner. “And this film is the strongest shield I have to protect our community.”

That said, Timoner cautions that the L.A. Fires were a foreshadow of things to come: “Half of California’s worst fires happened in the last five years. This won’t be the last.”

POSTSCRIPT

It took 25 days for the Eaton Fire to be extinguished after burning 22 square miles and killing 19 people. It took 31 days for the Palisades fire to be extinguished after burning 37 square miles and killing 12. The total square miles burnt in the two fires was roughly the size of the City of San Francisco.

Fires took 9,418 homes in Altadena and 6,837 buildings in Pacific Palisades and neighboring areas like Malibu.

Of the 16,255 structures lost, only a dozen have been rebuilt. About 900 homes are under construction. About 70 percent of homeowners remain displaced, many having wiped out their savings as they wait for insurers and others to help.