What If Someone Went Bar-to-Bar Promoting Euthanasia? - Director Interview w/ Andrew Shemin
The LOOPcast
CatholicVote
4.7 • 748 Ratings
🗓️ 24 March 2026
⏱️ 35 minutes
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Summary
What would happen if euthanasia had a marketing department?
In Breakfast of Champions, director Andrew Shemin imagines a darkly satirical world where a cheerful sales representative walks into a neighborhood bar with an unusual proposal: partner with her company to promote assisted death to elderly patrons. What follows is a tense and unsettling conversation that explores dignity, persuasion, and the quiet pressures shaping end-of-life decisions today.
In this interview, Andrew Shemin explains the inspiration behind the film, how satire can reveal uncomfortable truths, and why stories like this matter right now.
Watch now on Zeale: https://zeale.co/video/breakfast-of-champions
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | I'm joined now by Andrew Shemin. |
| 0:01.3 | He is the writer and director of the short film Breakfast of Champions available now on zeal.com. Fantastic film. I really enjoyed it. Andrew, welcome to the show. Thank you very much. Awesome. So I actually just finished watching it for the second time. And one of those cool things where you watch it and you see something different every time. But I say first things first, what was the inspiration for the short film? |
| 0:23.0 | Sure. Well, it had a very, a very clear origin in Genesis. I had watched a video in the fall of |
| 0:31.9 | 2022. It was an advertising campaign for a clothing brand that was, I would say, beautifying the concept of assisted suicide. |
| 0:47.3 | It was a Canadian clothing company called Simons. |
| 0:51.3 | And as a director, I'm familiar with the way that you enhance a subject |
| 0:58.0 | to make it appealing and all these kind of storytelling effects. And it was a really, really beautifully |
| 1:04.0 | shot three-minute-long campaign called All Is Beauty. And it was about a woman describing her choice to end her life at 37 |
| 1:14.4 | with the disease that she had in Canada. |
| 1:18.4 | And I was really just shocked and horrified. |
| 1:24.3 | I mean, first of all, just to be promoting assisted suicide and euthanasia. |
| 1:31.4 | But what was really scary to me was the beautification of it. And I thought if this is, if people can |
| 1:38.4 | conceive of this and if they can get people together to make it, this is really a step towards |
| 1:45.6 | normalizing it culturally. |
| 1:51.7 | Okay, I almost need to stop you here. Yeah. This was a commercial to sell clothing that was promoting assisted suicide. How was that even done mechanically? Like I'm making a hard time |
| 1:56.3 | wrapping my someone taking their own life at 37, but we want to sell you clothes. How did that even, how do they do it? |
| 2:03.3 | Yeah, I don't know the mechanics of what really inspired the person to make this. |
| 2:07.9 | I think it was more about attaching to a cultural vision or an ideology. |
| 2:13.3 | And they just thought this is beautiful. |
| 2:15.2 | You know, we would like to attach our brand to this. |
| 2:17.4 | Wow. So, you know, we would like to attach our brand to this. Wow. |
| 2:19.2 | So, you know, the, the scene opens saying dying in a hospital is not what's natural. |
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