The Cost of Paradise

When documentary filmmaker Marin Fletcher returns to her family's Silicon Valley estate after a decade away, she expects a deathbed goodbye with her tech billionaire mother. Instead, she finds protesters at the gates holding signs that read "Stolen Innovation, Stolen Lives" and chanting the name of a man she's never heard of: James Chen.

The deeper Marin digs, the uglier the truth becomes. Her mother's fortune—the mansions, the reputation, the billions that bought their paradise—was built on technology stolen from a marginalized engineer who died under suspicious circumstances in 1997. Now James's son David and the families displaced by Silicon Valley's wealth want more than recognition. They want justice. They want the world to know what Catherine Fletcher really was.

Caught between her brother Marcus, who'll do anything to protect their inheritance, and the victims who've spent twenty-six years screaming into the void, Marin faces an impossible choice: stay silent and keep everything, or expose the truth and lose it all. But some secrets have a way of destroying you whether you tell them or not.

A searing exploration of inherited guilt, the human cost of innovation, and what we owe for privileges built on someone else's destruction, The Cost of Paradise asks how much of ourselves we must sacrifice to break the cycle of complicity—and whether redemption is even possible when the damage can never be undone.