Laura Chinn’s movie is a deeply personal take on the Terri Schiavo case.
Looking for a movie that will make you cry? Watch Suncoast on Hulu. It’s guaranteed to give you that cathartic, teary-eyed feeling. It hits all the harder when you know that Suncoast is based on a true story, and tells a deeply personal tale.
Written and directed by Laura Chinn in her feature debut, this coming-of-age drama began streaming on Hulu on Friday, following its premiere at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival in January. Nico Parker stars in the movie as a teen girl named Doris, who has spent most of her life caring for brother Max, who has a terminal brain cancer diagnosis. Max—who cannot move, speak, or feed himself—has finally reached the end of his life, and will live out his remaining days in hospice care.
Doris wants to be a normal teenager, but Doris’s mother (played by an Oscar-worthy Laura Linney) only has eyes for her son. To further complicate matters, the hospice care facility where Max is staying has become a hotbed of political and moral debate. Read on to learn more about the Suncoast true story and Terri Schiavo.
The movie Suncoast is based on the true story of writer/director Laura Chinn’s childhood. Just like the character played Nico Park in the movie, Chinn was a teenager when her brother, Max Kenneth Chinn, was moved to a Florida hospice care facility to live out the end of his life in 2005, following a long battle with cancer. Unfortunately, that hospice facility turned out to be the very same facility housing a woman named Terri Schiavo, who was the subject of a real-life, landmark right-to-die court case in the early 2000s.
In a director’s statement for the film, Chinn recalled that “my mother’s plan was for [my brother] to spend his last few months on Earth in a peaceful, quiet place, but her plan was thwarted by a storm of protesters, religious zealots, photographers, journalists, and news cameras.
