Even as a Shadow, Even as a Dream

Even as a Shadow, Even as a Dream is the debut book by Academy Award-winning director Chloé Zhao (Nomadland, 2020), actor Jessie Buckley, and photographer Agata Grzybowska, created during the making of Zhao’s latest film Hamnet (2025). Rooted in the expansive dream-work that shaped Zhao’s creative process, the book emerges from a series of artistic rituals shared between these three collaborators, through which Zhao’s cinematic storytelling, Buckley’s mesmerising writings, and Grzybowska’s haunting photographs were made. Brought together in this book, they conjure a parallel telling of the story of Hamnet, the son of William Shakespeare. Even as a Shadow, Even as a Dream unfolds as a quiet companion to the film: not a document of its making, but a powerful reimagining that exists somewhere in the threshold between the worlds of waking and dreaming, reality and illusion, life and death.