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A Place of Fleeting Beauty: An Altadenan Filmmaker Sees Echoes of his Films in the Fire

By Jimmy Goldblum

Jimmy Goldblum wearing a hazmat suit in the rubble of his Altadena home after the Easton Fires.

Jimmy Goldblum wearing a hazmat suit in the rubble of his Altadena home after the Easton Fires. 

Sometimes, when I'm not crying, I joke that my life has become its own nightmarish version of The Twilight Zone: the ostensibly well-intentioned documentary filmmaker gets a dark cosmic reality check when he becomes the subject of one of his own films.

In the twenty years I've worked in documentary, nearly every independent film I've made was about people losing their homes and their sense of community. And now that my home, my neighborhood, and my community were engulfed in the Eaton Fires, everything feels both horribly new and strangely familiar.

The first documentary project I produced was called "Yearbook 2006;" it followed Benjamin Franklin High School, the first public high school to reopen after Hurricane Katrina. When I drove through Altadena this week for the first time, I told my shocked wife, "I've seen this before." I remembered driving through the desiccated neighborhoods of New Orleans, from unincorporated Metairie to Lakeview, through the Lower Ninth Ward, horrified at seeing vibrant communities––full of music and art and endless possibility–– reduced to a soggy mess on what was once called a front yard.

Back in 2005, I was still in college. I dropped out for a semester to make Yearbook with my older brother and some friends. So many of the students in New Orleans had lost their homes, but they also were dispersed into communities across the country, unexpected refugees. Benjamin Franklin re-opened because it realized that its students needed rituals to combat the sense of loss. Their students were stuck in a liminal place, a horrific in-between, and hosting prom and graduation became a way to cement them in a community, a place where they knew they belonged before they re-entered the larger world.

As I wander around Silver Lake, my fifth home in two weeks, I feel myself in a similarly dizzying place. Our community in LA has shown up with so much love and generosity—it often feels like a nurturing mother attending to a wounded child—but sometimes I wonder if all the love is preventing me from asking the real question, "Where do I belong now that my neighborhood is gone?"

When I was making Yearbook, I was reading the Romanian poet Andrei Codrescu, who wrote of New Orleans, "This is a place of fleeting beauty. The knowledge that we won't be here long gives everyone an intense appetite for living.” This makes me think of Altadena now. We were artists and musicians, old hippie weirdos and NASA-approved astrophysicists, and we all laughed at the base of the mountains in the morning, never believing our good luck.

After college, I was looking for another place with that beautiful macabre magic of New Orleans, and I found it in India. I started directing Tomorrow We Disappear, my first feature documentary. We followed the Kathputli Colony, India's last home to magicians, acrobats, and puppeteers. It was destroyed to make room for a glitzy mall and what was then New Delhi's first skyscraper. I discovered Kathputli in the back pages of Salman Rushdie's "Midnight's Children." Rushdie wrote of a colony of magicians in Delhi that disappeared and reappeared like magic and was full of communists; because magicians understand deception, they intuitively know to distrust the government. How perfect.

I Googled "India + magician's ghetto" and found a one-paragraph article in the Times of India about the illegal sale of the Kathputli Colony. Two months later, I was wandering this ostensible slum, its labyrinthine alleys hiding 2,800 artist families, who knew, any day now, the government would come with bulldozers and destroy the homes they built with their own hands. Along with the homes, the art and traditions would soon disappear too, because how could a puppeteer construct a 10-foot tall puppet while living in a tiny transit camp?

Tomorrow We Disappear taught me the interconnectedness between architecture and art and that a home isn't just a place you live; it's a sanctuary where you foster the culture, tradition, and values for yourself and for the generations to come.

Sabine Reckendorf's dog Trooper drinks from a mosaic fountain she constructed in Altadena.
Sabine Reckendorf's dog Trooper drinks from a mosaic fountain she constructed in Altadena. Photo courtesy of Jimmy Goldblum.

When I think of the puppeteers in Kathputli, I also think of my neighbor outside my driveway, Sabine Reckendorf. When we first visited our home in Altadena, we stared, transfixed, at Sabine's house, a bizarre and beautiful psychedelic wonderland. Every possible surface, inside and out, was adorned with colorful mosaics, sculptures, and elaborate towers, all designed and crafted by Sabine herself. Every day for the last four decades, she tended to her beautiful garden, a lush and restorative escape from the bustle of LA. I dreamed of shooting a film there; and we often told Sabine and her husband Kent that their home would be a museum one day – a wonderful relic to an artist mostly undiscovered in her time.

On the morning of the Eaton Fire, Sabine and Kent escaped their home, and those same beautiful trees she planted were on fire and falling down upon them. The home—which housed boundless creativity—is gone, but her mosaic towers miraculously still stand, beautiful artistic totems in a desolate landscape.

Beauty interwoven with destruction became a twisted obsession for Mohamad Hafez, the subject of my 2022 IDA Documentary Award-winning documentary, A Broken House. A Syrian-born architect, Mohamad came to the United States for grad school and was issued a single-entry visa, meaning he could come here, but he couldn't go home. As an architect, Mohamad knew how to make models, and soon he was reconstructing intricate memory palaces of his beloved Damascus as a way of soothing his homesickness. Those art pieces soon evolved as Syria experienced the civil war and the ensuing refugee crisis; Mohamad began destroying the miniatures as a way of reflecting the destructive reality of the war. His models became a fragmented mirror of all that was lost. Destroying them was Mohamad’s way to creatively weep.

A Broken House. Photo courtesy of Zach Lowry.
A Broken House. Photo courtesy of Zach Lowry. 

As I'm picking through the donation bins and looking for warm clothes, I think of the Syrian refugees that Mohamad and I interviewed in the Anfeh Camp outside Tripoli, Lebanon. When their family was moved into temporary housing, a charity worker aiding them showed them how to use a light switch. "We came from established lives, we had a life… We had a very nice house in Damascus with a lot of appliances. And we certainly know how to turn a light on. You can't explain millions of people with a single stamp: refugee."

As my neighbors rush to temporary leases, and my wife Feeloo and I hold back, afraid of anything permanent, terrified to possess more clothes than can fit in our small car, I wonder, is that what we've become? She's a child of partition, and I'm a child of Lithuanian pogroms—is this our destiny returning to claim us?

Feelo Aslam in hazmat suit in Altadena after the fires.
Feeloo Aslam stands next to a makeshift altar of objects she retrieved from the ashes of her home in Altadena. Photo courtesy of Jimmy Goldblum.

The original title of A Broken House was hiraeth, a Welsh word that translates to "a nostalgia for a place to which you can no longer return, or which maybe never even existed." It spoke to the way in which the homes and the homelands we lose ultimately end up existing only in memory. Eventually, in time, the memories we have may no longer correspond to the reality.

Every day, I speak to my neighbors in Altadena. We sift through the ashes and recollect all the things we lost: material, communal, and spiritual. We tell our story over and over again to kind strangers, and the documentary filmmaker inside me wonders if I'm really feeling it. Have I told the story too many times? Is it just a story I rehearse and recite now?

Tomorrow We Disappear opens with puppeteer Puran Bhatt giving the camera a tour of his hand-built home, the spaces “where their life begins and ends.” Then he looks over the colony, with artists drumming and carving puppets, and says, “It seems like it won’t be too long until we’re pushed out of here, and all of this is destroyed. I want to have a video made of my house. That way, after all of this is torn down, I’ll still have a memory of it. I want you to shoot in every room. Where we sleep, eat, and enjoy life together, so we can watch it in the future and say, this is how we used to live.”

Today I’m signing up for the government to come and bulldoze my property. I think: this is how we used to live.

Later, Puran would tell me, “We’re the flying birds. Here today, gone tomorrow.”

I look up at the mountains, the mountains I love with my whole torn-open heart, and I feel we Altadenans aren’t birds; we’re seeds. Scattered. Carrying the memories of what came before. Not yet sure of what we will become.

Jimmy Goldblum is an Emmy and IDA-winning director and producer, formerly based in his beloved Altadena, CA. He has directed some of the world's most visually ambitious and emotionally resonant documentary series, including Chef's Table, HOME, and Unsolved Mysteries.

His critically acclaimed short documentary A Broken House was shortlisted for the 2022 Academy Awards, nominated for an Emmy and a Cinema Eye Award, and won the IDA Documentary Award for "Best Short Documentary." His feature documentary Tomorrow We Disappear, about India's last colony of magicians, acrobats, and puppeteers, premiered at Tribeca and Hot Docs and was named by IndieWire one of the "20 Best Documentaries of 2014." jimgoldblum.com

Jimmy Goldblum recommends donating to the following GoFundMe’s for his friends and neighbors:

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