Being a teenager is hard.
It’s 2005, and Doris (Nico Parker, The Last of Us) is going through it. Her mom, Kristine (Laura Linney, Ozark), is moving her brother Max (Cree Kawa, Signs of Love) to hospice following a long time suffering from the effects of brain cancer. They arrive at the Suncoast facility in Florida to be greeted by swathes of protestors and police officers in light of patient Terri Schiavo’s story becoming mainstream news.
With a complex and emotionally heavy home life, Doris craves a bit of normalcy, even just getting to school on time. When Kristine decides to sleep at Suncoast until further notice to keep Max company, Doris offers up her house to her schoolmates so they can throw a party. But even with new friends and new experiences, she can’t fully escape the current hand of life that she’s been dealt. Or how Paul (Woody Harrelson, Triangle of Sadness), a protestor she unexpectedly befriended, lays it out for her: “You’re not normal, Doris.”
Suncoast, the debut feature film from Laura Chinn, is a moving coming-of-age story and multifaceted portrait of grief inspired by the filmmaker’s own personal life events during the mid-aughts.
The film made its world premiere at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival last month. Parker was honored with the U.S. Dramatic Special Jury Award for Breakthrough Performance.
Previously, Chinn created and starred in the 2019 Pop TV series Florida Girls. Her writing credits also include The Mick, Brad Neely’s Harg Nallin’ Sclopio Peepio, and Grandfathered. She also can be seen in Grey’s Anatomy, My Name is Earl, and Happy Endings. Her first book, Acne: A Memoir was published in 2022.
I sat down with Chinn earlier this week over Zoom on behalf of Art U News to discuss the making of Suncoast, her “dream cast,” and the importance of continuing to learn and grow in your chosen craft.
First of all, congratulations on the film. I watched it last night, and it left me totally in tears. When did you know or start thinking that this was the story that you wanted to tell for your first feature film?
It was the story first. It wasn’t like I was like, “Oh, I wanna make this into a movie.” It really was just this is a story that I wanna write down. I move in really small baby steps, or else I can’t get out of bed in the morning. [Laughs.] So I start with just like, here’s a story I wanna write down and send to my managers. [Laughs.] And that’s all I know, you know? So it really was just this story, this idea, the fact that I was a teenager at hospice with Terri Schiavo is something that I’ve talked about with people since it happened 15 years [ago]. I hadn’t thought about how to write it down. Coming from TV and things always being so open-ended in a series, I hadn’t thought about how to write an open and closed story into a feature film. So it was something I’d always wanted to tell. But when I finally had the space and time to do it, I really just wanted to do it just to tell the story, and then it sort of snowballed into where we are now, which is wonderful. [Laughs.]
Probably at the Movies 