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As if conquering cancer wasn’t hard enough, 17-year-old Ivy’s parents sign her up to spend her summer at what she calls “chemo camp”, where she manages to find unexpected friends in a group of misfits and has a summer she’ll never forget.
When writer-director George Jaques was pondering the story for his new movie Sunny Dancer, he decided to mine a deeply personal well
“My mum had cancer for a long time when I was growing up. I think it was part of why I got into writing, having that background when I was a teenager, and her getting diagnosed massively impacted the way I saw the world. So I knew I wanted to tell a cancer story.”
Keen to create an ensemble-led film, recalling the movies in the 1990s he loved, one that could showcase young British talent, Jaques hit on the perfect idea when he spoke to his longtime editor Caitlin Spiller. “I was saying, ‘I want to make a film about cancer, but I don’t want to make it depressing. I want to do a film with no hospital scenes.’ And then she said, ‘I had cancer when I was a kid, and I used to go on these summer camps for kids affected by cancer.’”
It was a light bulb moment for Jaques, and the start of a remarkable period of research. While such summer camps for children affected with cancer are not a phenomenon known in the United Kingdom, Jaques found another way into the story. He became an ambassador for the Teenage Cancer Trust. “I met a load of young people who’d grown up in hospitals.” He was even invited to visit a three-day
residential camp, ‘Find Your Sense of Tumour’.
It was here and meeting young survivors where he heard some amazing stories from those on the frontline.
“Young people telling me about when they used to race down the corridors with their IV drips, or when they got their first hand job on a ward, and you’re like, ‘I can’t believe you’re telling me this, this is amazing.’ And that was the moment for me when I realised cancer was the least interesting thing about them.
That really was what stuck with me when I wrote the film: let me put cancer in the background of a cancer film.”
Jaques didn’t want to follow the route that so many films about youngsters battling cancer take. “It’s all just so depressing. Obviously, people die, and that’s a horrid thing, and that’s awful. But you don’t meet a young cancer patient very often that’s just purely miserable. They are all trying to get the most out of life. And they’re so sick of being represented as these sickly, bald children; they want to be shown as these people that, although they’re faced with the worst thing to happen to them health-wise, they’re still pushing boundaries and finding joy in unlikely places.”
The writer-director pays tribute to Professor Rachael Hough, a consultant haematologist at UCLH.
“She took me around the Teenage Cancer Trust Ward, and she got all the staff to tell me stories about where they caught someone snogging, or a boyfriend being snuck in.”
Mixed in with this were memories from his mother’s illness. “She had breast cancer,” he reveals. “She survived, but it was a pretty intense period. But throughout, we had loads of laughs. There were some hard moments of course. But there’s so many funny stories that ended up in the script.”
Working under his Athenaeum Productions banner, Jaques began crafting the script for Sunny Dancer, focusing on a teenage cancer survivor named Ivy, who reluctantly attends a cancer camp at the behest of her parents. Alongside his editor Spiller, a perfect sounding board for everything that went in the script, Jaques was also joined by another long-term friend and collaborator, producer Ken Petrie.
After producing three of Jaques’ shorts and his 2023 debut feature Black Dog, under his 27 Ten Productions banner, Petrie was stoked to reunite with Jaques.
“I don’t know if you’ve ever been ‘Georged’, but he’s got a great knack of convincing people to help and do things, in the most delightful and genuine way,” says the producer, who was aware that financiers may be turned off by Sunny Dancer’s subject matter.
“I think it’s easy to read a log line and say, ‘Ah, well, I know where this is going.’ But we have no hospital scenes, no head-shaving scenes, no real medicaltype scenes. And actually, it’s about young people trying to be young people.”
Jaques created a sizzle reel to go out with the script to investors and potential cast.
“I always make a sizzle reel on the side of a project, just so you get a feel of what’s in my brain,” he says.
It was a way of capturing visually what the approach to Sunny Dancer would be. In keeping with the tone, Jaques also produced a pitch deck of the project in the style of a ring-bound journal with graffiti on it. “It was just trying to frame it in a slightly different world,” says Petrie.
Jaques and Petrie approached Hugo Grumbar at Embankment to help package the film.
“They really stood by the film and went for it,” says Jaques. When the team took the project to the Cannes Film Festival in 2024 in search of financing, Petrie was surprised just how film industry folk took it to their hearts. “It got such a warm reception”, he notes. Working with film financiers Night Train Media and TPC, as well as Screen Scotland, the film pre-sold to all of Europe and Latin America. “Eighty-nine percent of this movie was financed in the marketplace and with the tax credit,” says Petrie. “So, it actually came together as a market movie that people want, that buyers want, because they think their audiences want it.”
George Jaques – Writer, Director & Producer
Screen International Star of Tomorrow George Jaques is a 25-year-old director, actor, writer and producer from South London.
At 16, he founded his production company, Athenaeum Productions. George’s debut feature film BLACK DOG World Premiered at the BFI London Film Festival and was nominated for the ‘Best First Feature’ award. It was executive produced by Oscar Winning David Parfitt (The Father) and was also showcased as part of the Great8 competition at Cannes Film Festival. BLACK DOG released onto Apple/Amazon with a limited number of theatrical screenings. It won two awards at Riviera International Film Festival (Best Film and Best Actor) as well as being featured in Vogue.
Prior to this, George directed and wrote a number of short films which caught the attention of Sony, Sky and Warner Brothers as well as several sell-out theatre shows including a show at The National. In 2022, George was also the winner of the Breakthrough Filmmaker Award at the inaugural Soho House Awards. He has also just directed a commercial starring Dermot Crowley (Luther) and Sarah Greene (Bad Sisters) for BAFTA winning agency Don’t Panic.
