Derek Cianfrance Directs Tiffany & Co.’s Holiday Film “You & Me” for American Haiku and RadicalMedia

This holiday season, Tiffany & Co. is launching “Love is a Gift,” a new global campaign created in partnership with American Haiku and centered on a two-minute film starring Amanda Seyfried and directed by Academy Award nominee Derek Cianfrance, represented by RadicalMedia.

The campaign begins with a simple idea: Tiffany doesn’t just sell the gift – it creates objects that become part of the memories people carry with them. The film explores the difference between a gift and a keepsake, and how an ordinary day can become something that lives on across generations. 

“Starring new House ambassador Amanda Seyfried, our holiday 2026 campaign film, You & Me, celebrates the memories and traditions that bring us together across generations,” said Andrea Davey, Chief Marketing Officer, Tiffany & Co. “Moving between past and present, the film reflects the enduring place Tiffany & Co. holds in life’s most meaningful moments and the stories we carry forward.” 

The story moves between present day and 1990s New York, following a mother (Seyfried) and daughter through a December day that includes a ballet rehearsal, Tiffany’s holiday windows, and a gift that takes on greater meaning with time. 

At its emotional core, the film is about a daughter seeing her mother as a woman in her own right for the first time. Seyfried plays a New York choreographer, allowing the film to portray the mother not simply as the provider of holiday magic, but as a creative woman with a craft and identity of her own. 

“As kids, there are these rare moments when we get to enter our parents’ world – to see the places they go, the things they care about and the life they have beyond being our parent,” said Ben Muckensturm, Creative Director, American Haiku. “We wanted to capture that feeling from both sides: the excitement of discovering that world as a child, and the joy of sharing it as a parent. Amanda brought such a natural warmth to the relationship, both on and off camera, which made the mother-daughter connection feel so genuine.”

American Haiku deliberately moved away from the gloss-and-montage language of traditional luxury holiday advertising, instead embracing intimacy, natural behavior and powerfully subtle performances. Bringing in Cianfrance – director of Blue Valentine, The Place Beyond the Pines and The Light Between Oceans – underscores that cinematic approach. 

RadicalMedia produced the film, assembling a feature-caliber team around Cianfrance and shooting on location in New York over three days. Cinematographer Arseni Khachaturan, ASC, shot on the ARRI Alexa 35 with Olympus OM lenses, with camera from ARRI Rental NY, giving the film the texture of a remembered moment rather than a polished spot.

“Derek’s process depends on giving actors real spaces and room to discover the moment, so our job was to build a production that could protect that,” said Rebecca Niles, Executive Producer at RadicalMedia. “Working with American Haiku and Tiffany, we treated these two minutes the way we’d treat a feature: real New York locations, a period world built from the ground up, and a crew that could move with the performances instead of around them.”

Production designer Karen Murphy (Oscar nominee, Elvis), reuniting with Cianfrance after The Light Between Oceans, dressed an Upper East Side home with genuine pieces from the Tiffany Archives, including the Wisteria lamp. A custom ornament inspired by the iconic Bird on a Rock, designed by Jean Schlumberger for Tiffany & Co. in 1965, becomes the film’s central memory object – something designed to return year after year.

The 1990s setting is strategic as well as aesthetic. It evokes a culturally familiar, pre-digital New York while speaking to parents who experienced the decade as children themselves, mirroring the campaign’s larger theme of one generation passing something meaningful to another. 

That idea carries through the music: a reimagining of The Wannadies’ 1994 “You and Me Song” transforms a song associated with youthful romantic love into one about the enduring relationship between mother and daughter. 

The film will run globally across cinema, social (paid and organic), DOOH, site, owned channels, and clienteling across global channels.

For American Haiku, the campaign demonstrates the agency’s approach to large-scale brand storytelling: bringing together human insight, feature-film-level talent, music, design, and brand history to create work intended to operate as entertainment as much as advertising.