At a moment when ancient epics are again becoming material for large-scale cinematic spectacle, Film Notes publishes a conversation with Pelin Tan and Anton Vidokle about their film Gilgamesh: She Who Saw the Deep (2022), featured in the August 2026 online edition of e-flux Film’s Staff Picks. Rather than reconstructing the ancient world, the film approaches The Epic of Gilgamesh, whose earliest versions predate Homer by more than a millennium, as an unfinished work resonating in the present. Speaking with Lukas Brasiskis, Tan and Vidokle discuss the film’s making, its dialogue with Cosmism, and the cultural and political realities of southeastern Turkey.
Watch Gilgamesh: She Who Saw the Deep on e-flux Film here, through August 31.
Lukas Brasiskis: When did you first realize you wanted to make this film together, and how did your earlier collaborations shape the way you approached it?
Anton Vidokle: It was during the Covid pandemic, in 2020. Pelin was in residence at Bard College, but when the school shut down she was left completely alone on campus. My partner Lily Lewis and I were staying nearby, so we invited Pelin to stay with us.
Pelin brought a secondhand copy of The Epic of Gilgamesh that she had found somewhere in Red Hook. I had read it in college many years ago and didn’t really understand it, so I was curious to read it again. This time it was amazing: so resonant and mysterious. I loved the language and the way it was prose and poetry at the same time. Pelin was reading it too, and very spontaneously we decided to try to make a film.
Around the same time, we saw an open call for film funding from Sharjah Art Foundation and wrote a proposal. It worked, and our project was selected. It was not a lot of money, but it was enough to start planning a short experimental film to be shot in the region where Pelin lives, around the historic city of Mardin, near the border with Syria.
Pelin Tan: Anton and I began developing a method of working with the moving image years ago. I also see filmmaking as a way of developing “a thinking” through reflections and gestures shared with audiences, readers, or dreamers. I believe experimental film can visually represent the flow of thinking: it can mirror the movement of thought, shift frames of consciousness, and open new futures.
In our earlier films, we came up with the scripts ourselves. This time, the experience was different. We began with an existing script: a millennia-old epic that nevertheless felt so contemporary...even futuristic. We felt it had to become our film.
LB: Your film brings The Epic of Gilgamesh into contact with Cosmism, two bodies of thought separated by time, geography, and language. What made you think about them together, and what did each allow you to see differently in the other?
AV: Tablets containing the epic were excavated from the ruins of Ashurbanipal's library at Nineveh and brought to the British Museum. Nineveh, near present-day Mosul in Iraq, was destroyed in 612 BCE, but much of the library survived because its texts were inscribed on clay tablets. It was one of the largest collections of writings in the ancient world and perhaps the oldest library of this scale that we know of.
The British Museum’s collection from the library eventually grew to approximately thirty thousand tablets and fragments. In 1872, George Smith publicly presented his translation of a tablet containing the flood narrative from the Epic of Gilgamesh. It created an enormous sensation because the story was strikingly similar to the biblical Flood. For many religious people at the time, this seemed to offer a kind of historical confirmation of the Bible, although, of course, the implications were more complicated than that.
Nikolai Fedorov, the founder of Cosmism, was a deeply religious Eastern Orthodox Christian. He began developing his ideas about technological immortality and the resurrection of the dead around the 1860s. He also worked as a librarian. Although I have never found a direct mention of the Epic of Gilgamesh in Fedorov’s writings, I find it very hard to imagine that he did not know about its discovery. He did write an essay about Assyria, though unfortunately it is not among his best.
I guess the main point of connection for me is very simple. The Epic of Gilgamesh is perhaps the oldest known story about the human quest for immortality. And in a way, this is also what Cosmism is. But there is an important difference. Gilgamesh ultimately fails to overcome death and has to return to the world of human mortality. Fedorov refuses to accept this conclusion. For him, death is not an existential condition we must reconcile ourselves with, but a material problem that humanity has an obligation to solve. Putting these two bodies of thought together allowed me to see Cosmism as a very strange continuation of one of the oldest questions humans have asked, but with a radically different answer.
LB: You shot the film at archaeological sites along the Tigris, yet rather than attempting a realistic reconstruction of the past, the film unfolds through playful, staged scenes shot across places referring to different historical periods. How did you arrive at this experimental cinematic form, and what kind of relationship did it help you establish with the viewer?
AV: The places where we filmed are very special because different historical times are literally present at once: ancient ruins, medieval architecture, contemporary cities, dams, roads, and military infrastructure. People live their everyday lives inside this accumulation of time. We wanted the film to have a similar structure, where different times coexist without being clearly separated.
The playful and staged scenes came partly from working with the actors and partly from the text itself. The Epic of Gilgamesh is very serious, but it is also strange, excessive, violent, erotic, and sometimes quite funny. We did not want to turn it into a solemn historical monument.
I think this also connects to Cosmism. If the dead are still part of the human community, as Fedorov believed, then the past cannot be safely contained in the past. It remains unfinished and continues to make demands on the present. The jumps between different spaces and times in the film are perhaps a way of making this visible. We did not want the viewer to travel backward into antiquity, but to experience these different times as existing simultaneously, including their contradictions and discontinuities.
PT: Regarding the cinematic form, the film sometimes dwells almost fetishistically on landscapes, nonhumans, and their stillness. This attention to stillness shapes the flow of images and creates room for the viewer to enter the film. The most interesting part was finding a balance between creating specific scenes drawn from the epic and editing them according to our imagination. We wanted to leave viewers enough room to form their own relationship to the narrative and develop their own understanding and experience of the film.
LB: The title changes the epic’s “He Who Saw the Deep” to “She Who Saw the Deep,” and an all-woman cast performs its central figures. What became possible through this decision, and how did it change your relation to the epic’s heroic male tradition?
PT: For me, women are at the center of life in Upper Mesopotamia today. I live and work along the Tigris, and over the years I have come to know many Kurdish, Ezidi, and Assyrian women in the villages where we filmed. What moves me is their strength and the way they remain connected to the river and the earth, even as conflict and extractive development continue to drive people from the region. I think of this endurance as a living heritage, and in this sense as a form of immortality. The decision to work with an all-woman cast of Kurdish actors grew from this experience.
We filmed two scenes in places where women I have known for years welcomed us: Çinerya, an Ezidi village near Batman, and Dara, a Kurdish village near the Syrian border. Some of my Ezidi friends take long walks across the dry steppe, speaking to the land as they go. At a sacred cemetery, elderly Kurdish women water the plants and tend goats. These gestures already seem epic to me. People there also remember The Epic of Gilgamesh from childhood; their mothers told them its stories before bed.
AV: I felt the decision to work with an all-woman cast prevented the film from becoming an illustration of the epic. The women are not pretending to be the epic’s Mesopotamian male heroes. They remain contemporary Kurdish women speaking these ancient words in their language. This creates a distance from the inherited story, but also a new intimacy with it. The epic no longer belongs securely to the past or to the heroic male tradition through which it has often been transmitted.
LB: The performers often address the camera directly, and their acting reminds me of something between recitation, testimony, and theatrical performance. How did you work with the actors, and what did they bring to the film that you had not anticipated?
AV: The actors came from a Kurdish theater in Diyarbakır that had been continuously harassed and persecuted by the Turkish authorities. This was very important for us. The Kurdish language and culture have been subjected to a long history of prohibition and repression in Turkey, and speaking Kurdish publicly can still be a political act. Our film is largely in Kurdish with a few passages in Turkish.
So there was already something very strange about asking these actors to perform one of the oldest surviving texts in human history—a text that comes from the same broader region—in a language that has itself been suppressed. They were not pretending to be characters from the epic, and we were not trying to reconstruct Mesopotamia. They were contemporary Kurdish actors speaking an ancient text in the present.
There was some rehearsal, but not very much. The actors had strong theatrical training and brought a kind of intensity and precision that we had not anticipated. The performances moved between recitation, testimony, and theater, without ever settling completely into any one of them.
I think this ambiguity became very important to the film. The words are thousands of years old, the people speaking them are completely contemporary, and the language in which they speak has its own complicated and violent political history.
PT: I have always liked using direct-to-camera shots in moving-image works and giving performers room to improvise. Such shots interrupt the narrative flow and leave the encounter open-ended for the viewer. They also give the characters greater depth.
The actors were very experienced and curious about our experimental approach to filmmaking. The Kurdish region has a unique dengbêj tradition of sung oral storytelling and epic poetry, which carries Kurdish history into contemporary life. Of all the places I have lived, the Batman region has the deepest engagement with poetry: many people read, write, and love poetry in Kurdish, Turkish, and even Zazaki. I believe that our understanding of the rich and vitalist heritage of contemporary Kurdish and Ezidi cultures helped us establish a strong, creatively productive connection with the performers while shooting in the region.
LB: The script draws on historical and archaeological research into the epic and the sites where you filmed. How did this research inform the production of the film?
PT: I think of the film as a form of research. I do not see myself as a filmmaker or artist. Film lets me think through shifting mindsets and imaginary narratives. It is like a bridge between poetry and other forms of knowledge. I was interested in the archive of landscapes, forms of pre-architecture, and, as I mentioned earlier, women’s relations to more-than-human worlds in the Tigris River basin. I read books on Mesopotamia by Zainab Bahrani and Marc Van De Mieroop, as well as research by David Wengrow. These readings helped me understand the fragmented, nonlinear timeline of humans and nonhumans, as well as the history of dwelling in Mesopotamia. I think of Enkidu as the first ecologist, trying to save the Cedar Forest when Gilgamesh wanted to destroy it. It is very interesting to consider how stories from the epic relate to climate change, dam-related disasters, and aggressive urbanization in the region. Moreover, after making the film, the forms of dwelling and ideas of pre-architecture I had already been researching in the region took on greater importance for me. The epic can be read as a modern work that presents architecture and urbanism as signs of civilization—a discourse that remains powerful in our time. This is why the film’s final scene, which depicts urban Mardin today, was important.
AV: The epic itself is already an archaeological object. It survived by accident, in fragments across multiple tablets and versions, buried under the ruins of a destroyed city, and was later transported to another country, reconstructed and translated by people who lived thousands of years later. Even the story we think we know is a provisional reconstruction of something incomplete.
So perhaps the research entered the film mainly as a method. We began to treat the contemporary landscape in the same way as the tablets: as fragments of different times that had been broken apart and accidentally placed next to each other. An ancient ruin, a dam, a Kurdish actor, a military checkpoint, a flock of sheep, a line of poetry, and an archaeological museum could all become fragments of the same unfinished object.
LB: In the epic, the desire for immortality begins with Gilgamesh’s grief for Enkidu, while Cosmist philosophy relates this desire to a collective obligation to the dead. Does the film understand immortality as a refusal of death or as a way of sustaining a relation with the dead?
AV: I think it is both, but for me the ethical commitment to the dead is more important. A refusal to accept death can easily become a very individual desire: I don’t want to die, I want to continue. Cosmism is much stranger than that. For Fedorov, immortality was inseparable from the resurrection of everyone who had ever lived. It was not about saving oneself but about assuming responsibility for the dead.
This is also what makes the idea so radical and, in some ways, impossible. The dead are usually understood as belonging to the past, beyond any obligation we might have toward them. Fedorov insists that they remain part of the human community and that our relation to them is unfinished.
In The Epic of Gilgamesh, the desire for immortality begins with grief. Enkidu dies, and Gilgamesh suddenly understands that he will die too. His quest is personal, but it comes out of the loss of another person. So, in both the epic and Cosmist philosophy, the refusal of death begins with mourning. The difference is that Gilgamesh eventually has to accept mortality, while Fedorov refuses this acceptance and transforms grief into a collective task.
PT: I understand the concept of immortality in relation to the grief of friendship and to the question of how friendship and love endure. In the epic Gilgamesh is more focused on his own life and death, but the film asks whether she seeks immortality only for herself, as a form of power, or whether she hopes to reunite with Enkidu, the beloved friend with whom she shared so many experiences. I keep returning to this question and to the ethics of friendship.
LB: Alva Noto (Carsten Nicolai), known for his experimental electronic music and longstanding collaboration with Ryuichi Sakamoto, has also scored films including Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant. Alongside his score, the film includes other sound elements, such as a lament improvised by the actors. Can you talk about the importance of sound in your film and the process of creating the soundtrack?
AV: Sound and music are so important to film that sometimes I feel they matter more than the image itself: at the end of the day, it’s sound that produces the feeling of depth, space, and emotion. I have been friends with Carsten for many years and really love his music and sound works. He has an amazing sonic imagination: his sound does not illustrate, and his work is not naturalistic, but it creates a very complete sonic world that is both radical and extremely immersive.
For Gilgamesh, Carsten composed the score using some very unusual sounds. For example, he somehow had access to very ancient ceramic bowls from Cambodia. Not quite as old as the epic itself, but also thousands of years old. Much of the score is sampled from sounds produced by gently rubbing or tapping these clay vessels.
PT: The actors’ improvised lament was an experimental way of bringing into the film a poem from Hawara Dîcleyê (Dicle’nin Yakarışı in Turkish, or The Cry of the Tigris in English), Mehmed Uzun’s two-part historical novel about the epic storytelling traditions of Kurdish tribes in the Cizîr Botan region. In the novel, the poem takes the form of a song performed by its protagonist, an Êzidî dengbêj.
For us, this was a way of recalling dengbêj culture. The lament also invokes the Tigris as it appears in the novel: a river that speaks, lamenting the history of Mesopotamia and carrying the voices and languages of peoples silenced by conflict and massacres.
LB: This is not your first collaboration. How would you describe the division of labor and authorship between you, and are you planning further work together?
PT: As I said at the beginning, filmmaking is more of a research method for me. I have been a member of the Artıkişler video collective in Turkey since 2012, and my interests include semi-fiction, essay video, and video de/archives focused on sociopolitical issues. My work takes the form of a collective semidocumentary and video-essay practice. For example, I work with Ezidi women in Batman, writing scripts and poetry and combining them with hymns and images recorded over time, then constructing the narrative through montage. Our films with Anton are mostly fiction, and I very much enjoy thinking through, researching, and directing them together. Anton has a more mature artistic approach and an instinct that guides us. Over time, our collaboration develops into a shared intuition about what we want a film to be, and we proceed from there. For me, how we imagine the future of art together is always important. The places where we film are also important to me. Our previous films were shot in Tripoli, Lebanon (2014), and Cappadocia, Turkey (2013), and we are thinking about making a new film in the near future.
AV: We do have an idea for another film together, based on the ancient Sumerian poem The Descent of Inanna. It is about a goddess who descends into the underworld, where she is gradually stripped of everything, killed, and then brought back to life. It is an extraordinary text, and in some ways it feels like a natural continuation of Gilgamesh. We would love to start working on it, so perhaps this is also an invitation to someone who might want to commission the film.
