Wonderland

ESTE HAIM’S SCREEN EVOLUTION

The creativity of Este Haim, one-third of sister-trio Haim, finds new form as the screen composer behind Sunny Dancer, George Jaques’ bittersweet, critically cherished indie film. Sonically chronicling the experience of kids impacted by cancer at a summer camp, she shows how dark humour can’t exist without a dash of light.

Photography by Hedi Stanton

Este Haim appears on screen mid‑press blitz, half laughing at her own schedule. She’s in New York, the weather has finally shifted from a brief grey stint to sharp, bright sun, and her to‑do list reads like a Pinterest board for the terminally overachieving: grab a coffee, go for a walk, journal a while, then chip away at the TV show she’s currently scoring – Netflix’s newly-released Voicemails For Isabelle featuring Zoey Deutch and Nick Robinson – before diving back into a day of interviews. It sounds exhausting yet she insists it isn’t. “I’m booked and busy,” she grins. “It’s what I definitely want for me. I feel best when I’m busy, when I’m working. It’s partly a sickness, but I don’t care. Give it to me. I don’t need the cure.”

There’s a slow, minor wink in the eldest Haim sister’s perspective – a charming woman, full of life, joking ironically about not needing a cure for her workaholism despite navigating a life spent mostly with a chronic illness – but it’s also the lens through which Sunny Dancer starts to make sense.

Young actor-turned-filmmaker, 25-year-old George Jaques’ independent film is set at a camp for children living with or recovering from cancer, a premise that sounds, at first pass, like a one‑way ticket to cinematic melancholy. In reality, the film is messy and strangely joyful, full of crushes, pranks, petty jealousies and droning days that are only intermittently interrupted by the cloud of illness. And Este’s musical touch lives warmly in that gap.

“When you just say that sentence – ‘It’s a movie about a cancer camp’ – you’re like, ‘Oh my God, it’s going to be so fucking depressing and sad,’” she says. “But George has this magical way of also giving it levity, moments of comedy and spurts of joy, and that combination really made for this inspiring piece of film that made scoring it that much easier.”

Her way into the project wasn’t a brief or a budget; it was simply a coffee date. Jaques reached out early, when the film was transpiring rather than in action, and suggested they meet. Coffee brewed into lunch, settled into drinks, and by the end of it Este had essentially collected more of a new friend than a collaborative colleague.

George was “the number one reason” that she wanted to work on the film in the first place.. “I think that he’s so fucking smart and has such a vision and such a great taste level. We just wanted to keep hanging out with each other. I love making new friends.”

Only after they’d cemented their friendship did Jaques start talking in detail about the film: a camp for young people with cancer, or freshly out of treatment; a tight, contained world where kids are monitored and medicated but also get to experience falling in love and screwing around. Trying desperately to feel normal. How neatly this would reflect Este’s own history felt too good to be true.

“He started talking about the movie, and I told him it’s crazy you’re mentioning this because I went to a camp for diabetics when I was in high school.” Diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes aged 14 and, like a lot of kids thrust into chronic illness, she felt profoundly isolated. “I was the only diabetic at my school,” she remembers. “My family tried to empathise with me, but it’s really difficult to understand what it’s like to live with chronic illness unless you have one.” So, as a remedy that didn’t involve hospitals and appointments, her doctor suggested a diabetes camp, somewhere where she wasn’t alone in her struggle. A place where other young people also had to navigate carb‑counting, checking blood sugar levels, and, inevitably, finding a solid support unit away from the hospital hallways.

“To be in a camp, essentially trauma bonding over living with Type 1 diabetes – that kind of saved me,” she says. From the ages of 15 to 17, she returned to the camp for the summer. Similarly to the young teens running rampant in Sunny Dancer, headed by 17-year-old Ivy (played by Bella Ramsey), the memories are lurid and hormonal and weirdly cinematic; ebbing between sunburnt and wired; counsellors (played by Neil Patrick Harris and Shalom Brune-Franklin) hovering just out of frame; medical equipment part of the furniture.

“Hormones are raging,” the Grammy-nominated musician laughs. “I had crushes on every single boy at my camp. That feeling of pining for someone, the jealousy when you see them flirting with someone else, this feeling of, like, even the boys that I have everything in common with don’t even like me.”

On paper, diabetes camp and cancer camp are not the same thing. But in practice, the emotional beats are close enough that Este didn’t have to stretch. The characters in Sunny Dancer are teenagers first and patients second; that’s the real beauty of this film – their illnesses mould them rather than become them. As do their summer romances, their friendships, their measly betrayals. And it’s something the eldest Haim sister revelled in alongside the six teenagers.

“I think those were the memories I kept going back to,” she says with a subtle smile. “Just this feeling of young love and wanting…wanting to find someone that you feel like really understands where you’re coming from, and feeling understood. There’s nothing like that when you connect with someone.”

With Jaques’ script providing a sensitive and deeply personal roadmap, it was inevitably Este’s own history and experiences that provided the extra colour grading. On the surface, Sunny Dancer is full of moments that could so easily be minimised to melodrama – a late‑night confession, a body failing at the worst possible time, the abrupt reminder that some kids aren’t going to make it to adulthood. Real heart pangs. Nevertheless, Este refuses to score them as mere tragedies. She’s lived firsthand the weird mundanity of being ill while still, rightfully, wanting to be chaotic and silly and hot.

“When you have a chronic illness, especially when you’re that young, it really does something to you. You become hypervigilant,” she shares. “I look back on it now, and I’m like, 14‑year‑old Este was really fucking strong…or she had to be.” The same, she says, is true for the kids at the core of Sunny Dancer. The score had to honour that without embalming it. Some cues lean into the melancholy, but they’re threaded with a kind of sideways joy, the knowledge that even in the worst circumstances kids will still find a way to sneak out, to make a joke, to fall in love with the wrong person.

Whenever you’re exploring topics that are quite melancholic, and then actually, you feel quite joyous on the other side of it, it’s an interesting mix to navigate. Sunny Dancer lives exactly in that tension – and so does the music she’s chosen for it.

Beyond the original score, Este also serves as the film’s unofficial music supervisor, wiring Sunny Dancer into a larger universe of songs. The needle drops feel like they could have been pulled off old iPod playlists – the kind of tracks you put on repeat on the bus home from camp, volume up, eyes out of the window, main‑character syndrome fully activated.

For Este, that process is half instinct, half research, underpinned by a brain that hoards melodies the way other people hoard receipts – or rather captures the perfect snapshot. “I have a kind of photographic memory when it comes to songs. I can hear a song once, and I’ll almost usually know around 80% of the lyrics. I’ll definitely know all the melodies. The memories of those songs don’t go away,” she explains of her hidden superpower. “My RAM card is full…even when I think it’s full, somehow I still find room. I do have this knack for being able to pull songs out of the universe that I’ve heard once.”

Through research, the making of “multiple Spotify playlists”, and interrogating other artist friends, she would reach musical metamorphosis. And naturally, friends became co‑curators: her friend, producer and composer Zachary Dawes, pushed for Irish singer-songwriter CMAT – Este had seen her Glastonbury set and been “blown away, blown away, blown away” – and suddenly “Can’t Hack It Without You” was woven into the film’s fabric.

Elsewhere, teenage Este resurfaces via “Hysteric” à la the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. The film itself begins with Olivia Dean’s “The Hardest Part”, a twang of hope amidst the suggested impending doom. Then, in trickles, “Dreams” by The Cranberries, party hits like Tency Music’s “Cha Cha Slide” and “I Don’t Feel Like Dancin’” by the Scissor Sisters, as well as a live performance of “You’re Beautiful” by none other than James Blunt at the end-of-camp talent show. It’s an irresistible sonic expression of an experience that cannot be made linear. In the scattering, the disorientation and the mayhem, you can still be a Sunny Dancer.

That said, nothing is theoretical; every choice is tried on against the image. “A lot of it just has to do with experimentation,” she says. “You put a song in a scene, you throw it up on the screen, and you almost know immediately if it’s working or not.” The result is a film that sounds like the kids at its centre: bruised but not broken, dramatic in that distinctly infectious juvenile way, convinced that every look, every lyric, every stolen moment means everything.

Este’s own life hums alongside it – the girl at diabetes camp, the only diabetic at school, the adult composer “booked and busy” in New York, in love with London, married to a Brit, still playing cool to the fact that this is her job. “I love it so much,” she says, almost off‑hand. “To write music for a living? It’s the best job in the world.”

In Sunny Dancer, however, that job isn’t just to add more shadowing to the outlines. It’s filling the negative space with colour: the flirting, the jealousy, the boredom, the stupid decisions, the tiny pockets of freedom at the edge of something terrifying. Este scores the camp she once knew and needed, for a generation of kids who might see themselves in its chaos. The film is about cancer, yes. But more than that, it’s about the brief, blazing summers where you realise the worst thing that’s happened to you doesn’t get to be the only story.