Through Chloé Zhao’s cinematic storytelling, Jessie Buckley’s mesmerising writings, and Agata Grzybowska’s haunting photographs, this book conjures a parallel telling of the story of Zhao’s 2025 film Hamnet.

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.

Hamnet is in select theaters this November.

First edition published by MACK, 2025 © 2025 FOCUS FEATURES LLC
Film © 2025 FOCUS FEATURES LLC