Floridian residents of a certain age viscerally remember the name Terri Schiavo. She was a woman in a vegetative state who became the center of a national right-to-die debate when her husband petitioned against her parents to remove her feeding tube. Filmmaker Laura Chinn had a unique experience of the case, which took place in her hometown of Clearwater: her brother shared a hospice center with Schiavo in the mid-aughts as the case reached its divisive climax.
That’s the inspiration for her debut feature Suncoast, which she wrote and directed. Set at the same time and place, the film is a dramedy that wears its messy little heart on its sleeve. Beautifully shot and acted, it refuses to take sides in one of the most controversial modern debates, and is all the better for it.
Doris (Nico Parker) and her mother Kristine (Laura Linney) are struggling to get by...
That’s the inspiration for her debut feature Suncoast, which she wrote and directed. Set at the same time and place, the film is a dramedy that wears its messy little heart on its sleeve. Beautifully shot and acted, it refuses to take sides in one of the most controversial modern debates, and is all the better for it.
Doris (Nico Parker) and her mother Kristine (Laura Linney) are struggling to get by...
- 1/29/2024
- by Lena Wilson
- The Film Stage
Laura Chinn’s directorial debut, Suncoast, is based on the filmmaker’s own experience growing up in Florida in the early 2000s, when her younger brother, blind and deaf and in a wheelchair from brain cancer, was placed in the same hospice center that Terri Schiavo was at. It’s a harrowing story that Chinn detailed in her 2022 memoir titled Acne.
The contrast between the media circus and heated protests surrounding Schiavo’s case and the private suffering of a family—Kristine (Laura Linney) and her teenage daughter, Doris (Nico Parker)—who’s been saying a very long goodbye to Max (Cree Kawa) for nearly a decade, should have orchestrated a riveting tension. Instead, the Schiavo case is a barely felt presence, serving only to bring Doris, exhausted by years of helping care for her brother under the watch of her overbearing mother, into the orbit of Paul (Woody Harrelson...
The contrast between the media circus and heated protests surrounding Schiavo’s case and the private suffering of a family—Kristine (Laura Linney) and her teenage daughter, Doris (Nico Parker)—who’s been saying a very long goodbye to Max (Cree Kawa) for nearly a decade, should have orchestrated a riveting tension. Instead, the Schiavo case is a barely felt presence, serving only to bring Doris, exhausted by years of helping care for her brother under the watch of her overbearing mother, into the orbit of Paul (Woody Harrelson...
- 1/26/2024
- by Derek Smith
- Slant Magazine
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