Created during the making of Chloé Zhao’s film Hamnet (2025), this debut book brings together Academy Award–winning director Zhao, actor Jessie Buckley, and photographer Agata Grzybowska in a rare collaborative work. Rooted in the dream-work and rituals that shaped Zhao’s creative process, the book weaves Buckley’s mesmerizing writings with Grzybowska’s haunting photographs to form a parallel telling of the story of Hamnet, Shakespeare’s son.

Neither a behind-the-scenes document nor a traditional companion, Even as a Shadow, Even as a Dream exists in the space between waking and dreaming—an atmospheric reimagining that moves through illusion and reality, life and death.