.png){kind=logo}
What would you do? The fourth wall is tentative at the best of times in the films of Ondi Timoner — the clue is in the title of her production company, Interloper, under which guise she has smuggled her viewers into such hermetic communities as the friendship between rival rock bands The Brian Jonestown Massacre and The Dandy Warhols (Dig!, 2004) and the wild millennial-cult online world created by dotcom entrepreneur Josh Harris (We Live in Public, 2009). Lately, though, Timoner has taken to turning the camera on herself, and if you didn’t think a film could be more emotionally revealing than 2022’s Last Flight Home, about her father’s passing, prepare yourself for the 38-minute short All the Walls Came Down, in which the director and her partner are confronted with the destruction of their LA home and all the memories contained within it.
It’s a testament to these accelerated times that so much has happened in the last 12 months that the LA wildfires almost seem like ancient history. Well, maybe to the rest of the world, but not to the residents of Altadena, California, whose personal stories interweave with the director’s own and are still far from resolved. The film begins with Timoner inspecting the aftermath, a shocking reminder of the vagaries of fire damage; despite all the metal objects burned in the fire — a lockbox full of cash, a cased print of Timoner’s only non-doc feature Mapplethorpe (2018), and all her awards — a robe belonging to her father remains in the ruins of the bathroom (“That’s gotta be God,” says a neighbor).
In a twist of fate, Timoner was away, filming in Europe, when the fires broke out, which explains why the director is so committed to documenting the events of the night — the confusion, the lack of communication, and the sudden realization, for many as late as 3.30-4am, that the calvary wasn’t coming and it was time to just go. There’s a lot of information in this film, like the fact that 19 people died and 12,500 homes were lost between January 7-8, 2025. There’s also a note on climate change, and the fact that the worst wildfires in the area’s history have all taken place in the last five years. Add to all of that the fact that the cost for last year’s disaster has been priced at between $76 and $131 billion, with no guarantee that something similar can’t and won’t happen again any time soon.
Above all these things, however, All the Walls Came Down is — like the majority of Timoner’s films, and especially 2024’s All God’s Children — is about community. After the shock of her own loss, Timoner begins to process what else has been lost, discovering just how disproportionately the fires have affected Black and elderly residents, many with now-worthless reverse mortgages (“It’s almost like they wanted it to burn,” says one Altadenean). The film’s confined timeframe means it raises more topics than it can hope to address, but the ugly specter of gentrification is hard to dispel, just as the fire’s man-made origins reek of unaccountable corporate malfeasance.
As the title’s double meaning suggests, though, this isn’t an angry film, more a celebration of the way in which so many different people, from so many different backgrounds, pooled what little they had to come back better and stronger rather than bend to defeat. It’s a salutary lesson from a sobering film, a meditation on loss that dares you to put yourself in Timoner’s place and imagine the unimaginable. What would you do? No two viewers will react the same, nor should they. As her rabbi sister Rachel says, “Grief has its own timeline.”
Title: All The Walls Came Down
Distributor: Netflix
Director/screenwriter: Ondi Timoner
Running time: 38 mins
Release date: 7 January 2026
English (US) ·