left. Dustin Yellin
right. Ricardo Villavicencio
A conversation with the artist-turned-filmmaker Dustin Yellin, producer Justin A. Gonçalves, and animator Ricardo Villavicencio at the 79th Cannes Film Festival.
When three-year-old Zia Yellin wakes to find her stuffed lamb missing, she does what any child might do: she goes looking. What follows is anything but ordinary. In ‘Goodnight, Lamby’, Zia ventures into her father’s monumental glass sculpture Politics of Eternity, slipping through its layered dreamscapes – oceans, caves, the far reaches of space – on a quest to bring Lamby home. It is a modern fable, fifteen minutes long, and one of the most singular debuts to land at Cannes in recent memory.
The film is directed by visual artist Dustin Yellin, whose layered glass works, such as collages of paint, found imagery, and cultural detritus suspended between heavy panes, have hung in the Brooklyn Museum, Lincoln Center, and the Kennedy Center. It is produced by Darren Aronofsky and Justin A. Gonçalves under the banner of Primordial Soup, Aronofsky’s experimental tech and story company founded in 2023. The animation is led by Ricardo Villavicencio, whose studio has worked alongside Yellin for nearly a decade. Paul Rudd plays Papa. Chris Rock voices a character called Copernipus. Maggie Rogers wrote the original song. Jordan Dykstra scored it. Matthew Libatique, Aronofsky’s longtime cinematographer, shot it. And Demis Hassabis and James Manyika of Google DeepMind are credited as executive producers. What a dream team.
‘Goodnight, Lamby’ had its world premiere at Cannes Classics on Tuesday, 19 May at the Buñuel Theatre, a slot traditionally reserved for restorations and tributes, making its inclusion all the more remarkable for a debut.
Schön! met Yellin, Gonçalves, and Villavicencio on the third floor of the Palais on the morning of the premiere. We were embraced by the team with extraordinary warmth: a generosity that would extend throughout the day and into the screening itself.
left. Dustin Yellin + Darren Aronofsky
right. Darren Aronofsky
The Love Letter
Yellin has described ‘Goodnight, Lamby’ as a love letter to his daughter. I asked him when he knew Zia’s relationship with Lamby was the story he wanted to tell.
“You become a father, it changes your life,” he said. “The entire matrix of my consciousness has been changed by becoming a father. And then, of course, being with my daughter and seeing her relationship to her Lamby… I’ve had to drive two hours to retrieve the Lamby if the Lamby was not there at bedtime. So to see this connection formulate between my child and an inanimate object… and also the sculpture this movie comes out of, Politics of Eternity, where you have thousands of elements happening simultaneously, and you have this sort of adventure waiting to happen: it seemed like a very natural marriage.”
Directing his own daughter, he admitted, was not without its complications. “When I said to her that Paul (Rudd) is playing Papa, she said, ‘That’s not Papa.’ And then she grabbed me. I had to explain to her that I’m still her Papa, and that his name is Papa.” He laughed. “At some point, Paul made himself into a puppet that Zia was moving. There were little challenges. But it was really fun to see her at first not understand what we were doing at all, and then realise, oh, wait, this is pretend. And then she would perform for us. Where’s Lamby? I’m gonna find Lamby!”
Gonçalves credited Rudd’s instincts on set. “Paul, on the first day, said: I’m gonna meet her where she is. Gonna be present with her. That led to us being flexible as a crew and as a director, capturing the moment. Paul’s guidance was huge.”
Yellin offered a final, almost Magrittean image from the shoot: “He asked her, ‘Is that a pizza?’ about a palette she was holding while painting. And she said, ‘This is not a pizza.’” A pause. “She didn’t know it was a reference to this is not a pipe. But still.”
left to right. Justin A. Gonçalves, Ricardo Villavicencio + Dustin Yellin
Frozen Cinema, Thawed
For years, Yellin has called his sculptures “frozen cinema”: thousands of narratives and images caught in suspended animation between heavy panes of glass. ‘Goodnight, Lamby’ is, in his own words, the thaw. I asked what he discovered about his own work once it began to move.
“I call it frozen cinema, but when I look at it, it is moving. So it’s only frozen because it’s frozen, but when I look at it, it’s moving. And now it’s actually moving, which is just something I’ve wanted to do. So I feel like this was an exciting moment to throw some flames on that.”
The sculptural source material is Politics of Eternity, reimagined for the screen as sprawling topographies that echo, in Yellin’s words, “the meticulous detail of 16th-century landscape painting and the modern paroxysms of works such as Duchamp’s Large Glass.” Each layer of glass becomes a celluloid frame, moving through the sculpture, a physical montage.
The Human Hand
The film was made in collaboration with Google DeepMind, placing it squarely inside one of the most contested conversations at Cannes 2026: the question of artificial intelligence in cinema. Yellin’s director’s statement is firm: the goal was never to create synthetic worlds disconnected from the human hand.
Villavicencio, whose team handled the animation, was clear about this philosophy. “We’ve been working together with my team for around ten years. We ran into this technology early, before the whole ethical and moral issues came in. So I sort of skipped that part. I kept using this technology as a tool for our production. If you go through my work, you’ll see everything keeps the same organic tactile feel. We’re not going the opposite direction, turning this into synthetic images.”
He gestured at the deeper logic of Yellin’s work. “There are thousands of layers, little situations. Some are thought out, but others can be random. If you keep looking, you can find meaningful sequences. So there’s a movie there. With the team, we basically broke down every single piece of the sculpture and recomposed it digitally, brought it to life.”
Gonçalves added a producer’s perspective. “DeepMind was an ideal partner for two reasons. First, they let us get in through the back door, because we’re making a film about a child, and these models are built to prevent. There’s censorship built in. We worked with them to make sure Ricardo and Dustin could express themselves and bring this work to life in a way that’s faithful to the material. And to their credit, they set the stage and let us run with it. When you’re a small creative team like we are, that’s an ideal partner.”
The hardest part of holding the line between human and machine, Yellin said, was almost a non-question. “It was supernatural, because the material we started from was all handmade. Collage, painting, thousands, if not tens of thousands, of hours of analogue touch inside the sculpture. That was the DNA and genesis of all the material. Because of that, you had this intrinsic connection the entire time.”
Gonçalves picked up the technical thread. “Dustin’s work is a proscenium of frozen cinema. One angle, because obviously it’s not moving. So I remember talking to Ricardo early on, saying, how are we going to do three-dimensionality in this film? It’s paper, it’s layers of glass. The challenge Ricardo and his team rose to was getting us into that world. Not just a version of the film that follows Super Mario across the screen, but something much more immersive, visually and sonically.”
left. Dustin Yellin
right. Justin A. Gonçalves
The Grad School of Aronofsky
Gonçalves came to filmmaking via journalism and documentary, then worked as Aronofsky’s assistant on The Whale and Postcard from Earth before producing in his own right. I asked what he had learned in that orbit, and what he had brought to ‘Goodnight, Lamby’.
“It took me quite a few years to get into the film industry,” he said. “I came out of grad school and then got into another grad school: the grad school of Aronofsky. The attention to detail he has for his work, the unrelenting discipline, the focus, the man has focus like you’ve never seen. You pick those things up along the way.”
In this film, Aronofsky was unusually hands-on. “He was in the trenches with us. From story development to editing notes to sound design notes, he was right there, as involved as anyone. He really believes we can demonstrate through this project some new possibilities for the use of this technology. People haven’t seen this before. That’s why we don’t even send out links; we don’t want people watching on their phones. So much of what we have to fight through, for cinema to be part of public consciousness, is retaining the power of the image.”
An Instant Classic
I closed by asking Yellin what it meant that ‘Goodnight, Lamby’ was premiering in Cannes Classics, a slot usually reserved for restorations and tributes, alongside Visconti, Welles and Kurosawa. He smiled. “That it’s an instant classic.” Gonçalves laughed. “I can’t do better than that.”
‘Goodnight, Lamby’ premiered at Cannes Classics on Tuesday, 19 May 2026.
photography + words. Maria Biardzka
