Browse Movies : Adaptation : P : "true story"

In 2013, Samantha Bloom (two-time Academy Award nominee Naomi Watts), her husband Cameron (The Walking Dead’s Andrew Lincoln) and their three sons left their home in Australia for a holiday in Thailand. While enjoying a view, Sam fell off of a rooftop due to what was later determined to be a rotted railing...breaking her vertebrae in two places. Paralyzed from the chest down, Sam — a lifelong outdoorswoman, surfer, and traveler —was unrecognizable to herself, and spent long months in a depression that made her question who she could be in the world and in her own family.

A year later, her children brought home a wounded baby magpie they found. Warily eyeing the black-and-white bird the kids affectionately named “Penguin,” Sam bonded with the household’s new member, beginning a process of emotional healing that surprised her husband and sons, her mother (Academy Award nominee Jacki Weaver), and herself. Penguin Bloom tells the amazing true story of renewal that occurred when a woman whose life seemed shattered found hope and purpose in her family’s love — and in a bird on its own journey of recovery.

A neurosurgeon, who teaches at Harvard Medical School and other universities, believes in science over faith. Despite being a Christian, he does not embrace religious theories of the afterlife until he contracts a rare bacterial meningitis that penetrates his cerebro-spinal fluid and attacks his brain. He lies near death, comatose for seven days. He awakes with a clear recollection of what he describes as a journey to heaven.