August 1–31, 2026
e-flux Film presents Gilgamesh: She Who Saw the Deep (2022, 47 minutes), a film by Pelin Tan and Anton Vidokle, as the August 2026 edition of Staff Picks.
Watch the film on the e-flux Film online platform through August 31.
Following the death of Enkidu, his closest friend, Gilgamesh sets out in search of immortality. Tan and Vidokle approach this ancient story as a living text, performed by an all-woman cast from Amed Theater in Diyarbakır.
Filmed in Mardin, Dara, and Hasankeyf, in the wider Tigris region of Upper Mesopotamia, the film brings Gilgamesh’s journey into a landscape where archaeological remains coexist with contemporary cities and ongoing political transformations. Inspired by Sumerian cosmology and the philosophy of Cosmism, it asks whether immortality can be understood beyond individual survival—as a collective relation to the dead and to an unfinished past.
Accompanied by an original score by Alva Noto, Gilgamesh: She Who Saw the Deep is a film about life, death, friendship, love, and the human refusal to disappear. The film is shot by Ayman Nahle and is in Kurdish and Turkish.
Watch the film here.
Read a conversation with Pelin Tan and Anton Vidokle in this week’s e-flux Film Notes here.
About the artists
Pelin Tan is an artist, sociologist, and art historian based in Mardin. She is a professor at Batman University, where she heads the Department of Cinema and Television and the MA program in Cultural Studies. Tan is a member of the Artıkişler video collective, editor of i press, and currently an artist fellow at the Tarabya Cultural Academy in Istanbul. Her book Forms of Non-Belonging is forthcoming in 2026 from Sternberg Press, co-published by e-flux journal.
Anton Vidokle is an artist and founder of e-flux.
About the series
Staff Picks is a streaming series on e-flux Film of films selected to disrupt the monotony of algorithmic recommendation. Before the end times of big data, we used to discover suggested content along dusty shelves in video rental stores, where Post-it notes scribbled by shift workers implored us to experience the same movies that made them guffaw, scream, or weep. Sometimes the content bored us, sometimes it overwhelmed us, and sometimes, as if by magic, it was just right. e-flux invites you to relive this rental store mode of perusal, with personalized picks curated through judgment that does not take into consideration your viewing history.
