Tuesday, September 16, 2025

Film Review: When Altadena’s Walls Came Down

Eight months after the Eaton Fire destroyed her Altadena home and claimed the lives of 19 fellow Altadenans, award-winning filmmaker Ondi Timoner has premiered a documentary chronicling the community’s response to the disaster.

“All The Walls Came Down,” a 39-minute Interloper Films production, is screening daily at Laemmle Glendale through Sept. 19. The film, which debuted at the Telluride Film Festival on Aug. 31, has drawn sold-out weekend audiences, post-screening Q&A sessions, and community gatherings.

Yale-educated Timoner, a two-time Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner, said the project was driven by her desire to “transmute the experience to turn it into something that might be a positive.” The documentary explores how residents mobilized in the absence of effective emergency services, offering a portrait of resilience and grassroots recovery.

Producer Maggie Contreras, Eli Timon, and Elle Schneider joined Timoner in the production. Schneider began filming immediately after returning to her fire-ravaged home, capturing raw footage that anchors the film’s emotional core.

Timoner frames All The Walls Came Down as a transformation story: a private catastrophe that becomes a public instrument. By foregrounding documentation as reflex—“record now, discover purpose later”—she recasts filmmaking as a form of emergency response in its own right, designed to mobilize resources while the legal system moves slowly. The rhetoric is deliberately catalytic: “climate refugees,” “the walls came down,” and “keep Altadena not for sale” distill complexity into phrases intended to galvanize neighbors and donors as much as viewers.

Race and infrastructure access enter through a moment she calls “white blindness.” When community organizer Heavenly Hughes says “you moved into a Black neighborhood,” Timoner accepts the line as a lens, connecting alleged service failures on the night of the fire to longer histories of redlining and displacement. That move shifts the film’s center of gravity from personal grief to structural critique, aligning the project with efforts to keep long-time Altadenans—especially multigenerational Black families—rooted as rebuilding pressures mount.

Her strongest claims are prospective and programmatic: that a film, released quickly, can stop foreclosures and raise “hundreds of thousands” of dollars; that telling a story “beneath the headlines” is itself a material intervention.

Timoner’s tone travels from shock to solidarity. The closing pitch—Q&As, gatherings after screenings, a website as a hub for volunteering and screening requests—suggests the film is conceived not just as an account of what happened, but as a civic scaffold for what should happen next.

That ambition is the film’s through-line. What the public systems did or failed to do, who was harmed and how, and whether the film’s aspirational impacts can be realized will determine whether All The Walls Came Down is primarily testimony, advocacy, documentary, or all of those things.

For more information visit allthewallscamedown.com