#dig!

DIG! XX (2024) - Ondi Timoner

about two years ago I was at the beach with my family and I got an urge to just dig and bury myself within the earth. I obviously didn’t go very deep considering I’m here typing this, but i just got a persistent nagging feeling to go dig now and every time i remember how relaxing it felt to be covered in the earth and to feel it pressing in on my body.

but it was not river's intelligence

There's a lot of fundraisers and Gofundme campaigns right now set up to help those impacted by the L.A. wildfires. Filmmaker Ondi Timoner and her partner Morgan were among those impacted. They lost their home while both were overseas and in addition to personal belongings their film equipment, research, awards, etc were destroyed as well.

Ondi is one of the great documentary filmmakers of our time. I was so blown away by her 2004 years-in-the-making doc Dig! about the friendship and rivalry between indie rock bands The Dandy Warhols and Brian Jonestown Massacre after I saw it in the movie theater that I actually reached out to her via her website and she got back to me. I sent her my short film Musician For Hire, which had some similar themes as Dig!, and she gave me some great feedback and we later met up at the Dig! DVD Party in NYC. We have met a few times since and stayed in touch. Since Dig! she has made several fascinating docs such as Join Us about escapees from a cult and We Live in Public about an early dot-com pioneer. In early 2023 I interviewed Ondi via phone about her phenomenal and deeply personal documentary Last Flight Home (which I named Best Documentary of 2022) and she was super cool (as usual).

me with Ondi at the Dig! DVD Release Party in NYC on 4/11/2005