Ondi Timoner documents her father’s intentional final days in “Last Flight Home”

Speaking over lunch near her home last month, Timoner says that the documentary footage stemmed from “this desperate feeling that I needed to capture my father, but it wasn’t intended for public consumption.”

As the extended family gathered in her parents’ Pasadena home, Timoner set up cameras and kept them running. “I just document everything all the time,” she says. “My family, therefore, is very used to being documented by me, so they didn’t think the multi-camera setup was really anything.”

She also spoke to a therapist “to see if I was trying to hide from something or mediate my relationship to his dying, and she actually, to my surprise, said: ‘If you feel like you need to film, you should film.’”

What transpires over the course of two weeks is a series of heartfelt conversations, goodbyes over video calls, secret-sharing and tears. We learn the story of Eli’s success as the owner of a Florida airline company and then of his financial collapse after a stroke in his early 50s left him partially paralyzed.