Director: Laura Chinn
Grief and ordinary teenage life share the same house in Suncoast, a 2024 drama drawn loosely from writer-director Laura Chinn's own adolescence.
What is Suncoast about?
Doris is a teenager trying to hold on to something like a normal high-school existence — friends, a crush, a party or two — while her brother's terminal illness pulls the rest of her family's attention away from her almost entirely. Her mother moves him into a hospice facility to be closer to round-the-clock care, and it's there that Doris strikes up an unlikely friendship with an older man, played by Woody Harrelson, whose wife is a patient in the same building during a period of intense public attention around end-of-life care. The film follows Doris as she tries to figure out how to grow up and grieve in the same stretch of months, with neither process waiting politely for the other to finish.
Cast & crew
Nico Parker leads the film as Doris, with Laura Linney as her mother and Woody Harrelson as the hospice neighbor who becomes an unexpected source of comfort; Daniella Taylor, Ella Anderson, Amarr M. Wooten, Ariel Martin, and Keyla Monterroso Mejia round out Doris's circle of friends.
Context & significance
Writer-director Laura Chinn based the story on her own teenage years, setting the film's hospice storyline against the real, widely covered Terri Schiavo case, which was unfolding in Florida at the same time and gives the film's backdrop a specific, documented moment in the culture rather than an invented one.
Where & how to watch
Suncoast is available to watch on K-Time with a free account login, and the platform's Farsi-first design makes it simple for Persian-speaking viewers to find it, with Persian dubbing and Persian subtitles both available for anyone who prefers to watch in Farsi.