The 10th annual CASCADIA International Women’s Film Festival in Bellingham returns on April 30 with a gala screening of the New Zealand documentary TENOR: My Name Is Pati, written and directed by Rebecca Tansley. The fest’s in-theater component continues through May 3, while a subsequent virtual festival runs May 7 thru 17.
Award-winning filmmaker Ondi Timoner (Dig!, We Live in Public, Last Flight Home) will attend the festival as an honored guest. As part of a salute to her work, she’ll present her workshop program “How to Make a Great Documentary,” along with a screening of her 2025 short All the Walls Came Down, which chronicles the almost total destruction of her neighborhood, including her Altadena home, in the 2025 Los Angeles fires and how residents came together in the aftermath.
“I made a deal with IndieWire that I'd give them my photos of myself in the ruins of my home if they wrote me a little letter saying I was a journalist,” Timoner told the SGN. “We put together these fake media passes for Interloper Films to flash at the National Guard, and this meant we were the first cameras on the ground documenting the aftermath. But what started as a very personal story became so much more.
“When my house burned down, I didn't know that I lived in a predominately Black community,” she explained. “I knew that I lived in a wonderfully diverse town in Altadena. I knew that I loved raising my son there for 15 years. I knew that I was the most accomplished documentary filmmaker in the town who had lost their home. It’s what I didn’t know that made this story so personal.
“How was it possible that no firetrucks showed up and no one had any evacuation orders? What happened here? What I discovered was that 80% of Black families in Altadena owned their own homes until this disaster. It’s the second-largest Black homeownership in the entire country, and now the vultures are coming and trying to push them off their land. So this film has become this anthem and this shield for the community. These stories are important. It’s an example of something you can do if you pick up a camera and you don't just sit there.”
Driven to tell stories
The filmmaker has been picking up that camera from an early age, and it is exactly this resourcefulness, courage, and resolve that Cascadia wanted to honor. “It's always just so impactful to me and touching when my body of work is acknowledged,” said Timoner. “I've been making films now for 33 years, since I was 19. It's been the greatest, but also life-defining, decision I ever made, to become a documentary filmmaker. This work has kept me learning endlessly, and sharing what I learn with audiences is a privilege. The best absolute best part is when the film moves a person to think deeper, to accept death or life or loss. Or when the work that I'm making helps to transmute life for other people. That's why I do it.”
For Timoner, it is as if she is driven by an impossible force to step behind the camera and keep telling stories of human perseverance and triumph in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. “I can’t help but do what I do, and most of my films are about people who can't help but do what they do,” she said. “I call them impossible visionaries. (I'm actually writing a memoir now of the same name…) People who take on the impossible because they have a vision that others might not [share]. Like with Mapplethorpe, my scripted film, which is not showing at the festival, or with Dig!, which is. Last Flight Home is about my father, and he is my original impossible visionary. It’s also showing.”
Timoner grew quiet for a moment before finishing her thought. “When Claudia Puig, the director of the festival, said, ‘Some filmmakers document the world, Ondi Timoner changes how we see it,’ that was the ultimate compliment. To know that and feel that my work has the kind of impact on other people is really … the greatest reward. Heading to Cascadia, sharing [these films] with an audience that's dedicated to the work of women directors, teaching my master class and mentoring, that's what it's all about.”
It’s a career worthy of celebration. Timoner is the only director to have won the prestigious US Grand Jury Prize at Sundance twice: for Dig! in 2004 and We Live in Public in 2009. Locally, her film Library of Dust took home the Grand Jury Prize for best documentary at the 2011 Seattle International Film Festival. Timoner has also had several of her documentaries make the short list for a potential Academy Award nomination, most recently Last Flight Home, about the final days of her father, Eli Timoner.
Origins
“It’s surreal,” Timoner admitted when asked to reflect on her career. “It's moments like this where you think, ‘How did I get here?’ Then you remember all of the many hundreds of all-nighters. When I came up, I was at Yale [working] at a public access station, because Yale University didn't have any production facilities at that point.
Filmmaking classes were sort of studying the tropes of the Western, John Ford, B&W, all of that. It was like cocktail party conversation. But there was one class called American Documentary Film that was really impactful. I saw the movie Titicut Follies in that class, [directed] by Frederick Wiseman, and I realized that life could be this. I realized that this work could be a powerful observational medium in which you get to be inside a world you could never otherwise enter.
“So, I was at this public access station with my brother, David, learning how to edit on these shuttle editing systems and out there with a little consumer video camera that I asked my parents to get for the holidays,” she recollected. “That was what I wanted, and when I got it, I went and interviewed people and asked them to tell stories about what made them happy, what they thought of Gays in the military, and what they feared the most. That was my first film. This one truck driver at this gas station, I asked him what he feared the most. He said, ‘Women with video cameras,’ so that was the name of the movie: 3000 Miles and a Woman with a Video Camera.”
Latest film
One of Timoner’s earliest projects is also one of her least accessible: The Purple Horizon, a 60-minute chronicle of the April 1993 March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation. It isn’t lost on the director that, over 30 years later, the themes, topics, and concerns outlined there have sadly risen once again to the top of the cultural zeitgeist.
“I think the world works in a cycle,” Timoner stated. “The pendulum swings, and here we are back with fascism and with Gay marriage being threatened. It's really disturbing. But my new film is called The Secretary of Evil… for Legendary Pictures, so it's been well funded and is hauntingly beautiful. It's about the last Nazi to stand trial, and it's powerful, because she is met in court face-to-face with a once six-year-old survivor who's now 86, and she's 96 or 97 at the time she goes to trial. She was 17 when she took the job for the commandant of the Stutthof concentration camp, and she made a choice back then, a choice that she was indoctrinated to make.”
Timoner paused. “I can’t tell you more now,” she candidly admitted, “but that’s the film I’m wrapping. We have to keep telling these stories, all of these stories, no matter how painful. We can never forget what happened in the Holocaust, especially right now. The pendulum is swinging and, by telling these stories, maybe we can get it to swing back the other way.”
As for her time at Cascadia, the filmmaker knows what she wants attendees to take away from their time at the festival. “I want them to be inspired to go and do whatever it is that they feel like they need to do to get up and to be active in voicing their concerns, not to be passively complicit with what is happening right now. That’s important.”
Bellingham’s CASCADIA International Women’s Film Festival runs April 30 thru May 3, with a subsequent virtual component running from May 7 to 17. For more information, including locations, tickets, and festival passes, go to https://ciwff2026.eventive.org/welcome.
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