Filmmaker Ondi Timoner to Receive Golden Key Award for Excellence at Key West Film Festival

Miami born filmmaker Ondi Timoner will receive the Golden Key Award for Excellence In Documentary Filmmaking at this year’s Key West Film Festival.

The festival will show her latest feature film All God’s Children, and her most recent short film, All the Walls Came Down. She will also be joined by Addie Morfoot of Variety for a special conversation about her work spanning the last three decades.

Previous honorees of the award include Sheila Nevins and Erin Lee Carr.

Ondi Timoner is an award-winning filmmaker known for documentaries about visionaries challenging the status quo. She’s the only director to win Sundance’s Grand Jury Prize twice—for DIG! and We Live in Public, both in MoMA’s permanent collection. Her 2022 film Last Flight Home, about her father’s end-of-life journey, was Oscar-shortlisted, Emmy-nominated, and earned her the Visionary Award for Observational Filmmaking as well as the Humanitas Prize.

In 2024, she premiered Dig! XX, The Inn Between, about the only hospice for the homeless in the U.S., and All God’s Children about an interfaith project to stop racism and anti-semitism. In 2025, she created a short film about the historic LA fires that took her home and town of Altadena called All the Walls Came Down, which premiered at the Telluride Film Festival.

Timoner also produced, directed, and edited the scripted feature, Mapplethorpe: The Director’s Cut, the critically-acclaimed ten hour series, Jungletown, and numerous award-winning short films, commercials and music videos. Timoner founded Interloper Films, is a member of the Academy of Motion Pictures and the Television Academy, and chairs the Nonfiction Subcommittee for Special Projects at the DGA.

“Ondi is above all a master storyteller, both as a documentarian and narrative filmmaker. She captures truth, honesty and emotion in any story she tells. She is no stranger to the Key West Film Festival, being the only filmmaker to ever win awards for in both documentary and narrative sections at the festival (Maplethorpe in 2018 and Last Flight Home in 2022), and the Golden Key for her entire body of work is a natural progression of the recognition she so truly deserves,” says Michael Tuckman, Artistic Director of the Key West Film Festival.