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Documentary Series · Türkiye · Since 2021

Regenerative Stories

The repair is already underway in Türkiye.
Most of the world hasn't found this story yet.

Land · Water · Food · Community · Systems · Hope

Watch the Films Partner With Us

The Films

Four films.
One healing land.

Each one starts with a person who chose to stay and repair instead of leave. Watch them in order, or jump to the story that pulls you.

4 films 2021 to 2025 7 regions of Türkiye

01 · Feature · 42 min · 2021

Released · COP 2023

Awakening of
the Soil

Edirne · Konya · Silivri · Eskişehir

A skeptical Thracian grain farmer visits five zero-tillage practitioners around Turkey and discovers that his tractor is the main obstacle to his soil's recovery. Every field stop adds a layer: corn growing without irrigation, earthworms in a border a machine hasn't crossed in three years, soil dark enough to crumble between two fingers.

China Int'l Documentary Festival · Guardian Foundation

Watch full film on YouTube
01

02 · Episode 01 · 16 min · 2024

Released · 13,000+ views

Seeds of
Change

Tilya Ekolojik Kooperatif · Istanbul

Three people sign a working contract with the land and with each other on the edge of Istanbul. Turkey's first ecological social cooperative begins. Solidarity as infrastructure. Food justice at urban scale. A cooperative built not from manifesto but from a working organism still alive.

Postane Kültür ve Doğa

02

03 · Episode 02 · 11 min · 2025

Award Winner

Rebuilt from
the Ground Up

Burhan Eltan · Kaz Dağları

A former Istanbul urbanite designs 30-square-meter regenerative micro-gardens in the Ida Mountains, proving exhausted soil can feed a family without a gram of synthetic input. The engine is BioTam Compost, applied to the soil food web like a vaccine. A structure that other people land inside and don't leave.

Bornova Short Film Days · Dijital Detaylar Award 2026

03

04 · Episode 03 · In Post Production · Aug 2026

Coming Soon

Magical
Seeds

Ertem Family · Tekirdağ

Aylin spent twenty years in heavy industry before she noticed she had lost touch with herself. The land the Ertem family bought had gone unfarmed for twenty-five years and they had no plan for it; a consultant had told them to plant walnuts, and they spent their weekends grilling outside a caravan. The first thing they did was ruin it: they levelled the field like a football pitch and buried the topsoil underneath. "We didn't improve the land," Süleyman says. "We made it worse." The repair took years: corn, green manure, chickens, geese, sheep; five dönüm became forty, and the eczema Sinan had carried since childhood eased off. Somewhere in those years Aylin went back to university, this time to study the subject she had been kept from in her youth.

Coming August 2026 · RS Episode 03

In Post Production
04

01 · Surface

We didn't start
with a pitch.

Four years ago: one field, one camera.

02 · Beneath

A tractor.
A hive. A net.

The people came first. The films came after.

03 · Roots

Nobody
commissioned this.

Each one began with someone choosing to stay.

04 · Seed

It all came
from here.

2020. One grant, one field, one film.

2020 — Present

How We Got Here.

2020

Impact Hub Istanbul
× U.S. Mission to Türkiye

Project Zoom grant · first film produced

2023

News Lab Turkey
× The Guardian Foundation

Media Incubator · 400K+ views reached

2024

Guardian · Kundura Doc Lab · Ministry of Culture · Postane · FabriKHAS

3 grants + 3 fellowships · Tilya + Onarım Hikayeleri

Now

Season One
In Development

Applying · NatGeo × Climate Pledge Global Storytellers Fund

Supported & Selected By

T.C. Kültür ve
Turizm Bakanlığı
News Lab
Turkey
The Guardian
Foundation
Impact Hub Istanbul
Kundura
Doc Lab
Postane
FabriKHAS · Kadir Has Üniversitesi

Proof on the Ground

Four years.
Seven regions.
One living archive.

Four years and seven regions later, the footage is a map of who is repairing this land, and how.

500Practitioners
mapped
120Characters researched
in depth
4+Years in
the field
7Regions of
Türkiye
4Films completed
400K+Cross-platform views
~500Climate decision-makers at COP 2023
4,950Total subscribers
Recognition Best Climate Film, Chinese International Documentary Festival 2023 · Award Winner, Dijital Detaylar 2025

The archive is the proof. The next six stories are where it goes.

Season One · In Development

Stories We're Pursuing.

Currently applying to the NatGeo × Climate Pledge Global Storytellers Fund.

01 · Earth · Çankırı

Hüseyin
Genç

Üç Elma Farm · Doğanbey, Çankırı

Hüseyin Genç first heard the name Masanobu Fukuoka in Germany in 1985. He spent the next twenty-five years as a civil servant, then retired in 2000 and went home to Çankırı to test whether a Japanese philosophy of not-doing could hold in Anatolian steppe. He and Keziban stopped tilling, stopped spraying, stopped cutting the grass. The apples came anyway. So did üveyik wheat, a local variety almost nobody grows now.

02 · Water · Şırnak

Cüneyt Kaya &
Münevver Oral

Tigris River, Şırnak

For three months Cüneyt Kaya and Münevver Oral walked the Tigris for a fish the world had given up on. The leopard barbel hadn't been seen since 2011. It's #2 on the planet's ten most-wanted lost fish. In 2024, following a Şırnak fisherman's memory, they found it alive. Three years earlier the same pair pulled the Batman-banded loach back from fifty years of silence.

03 · Fire · Muğla

Elif Deniz
Ülker

Marmaris–Köyceğiz, Muğla

After the fires moved through Marmaris and Köyceğiz, most people counted the loss. Elif Deniz Ülker went looking for what survived. She spends spring nights along scorched streams with a flashlight, counting Lyciasalamandra, a salamander found nowhere else on Earth, and summers collecting the seeds of plants that won't return on their own. Her field data now sits inside Turkey's national guide for rebuilding a forest after fire.

04 · Air · Hakkari

Hacı
Tansu

Cilo Mountains, Hakkari

For roughly twenty years Hacı Tansu has climbed back to the same points on the Cilo Mountains and taken the same photograph. President of Hakkari's mountaineering club, he lines up decades of frames side by side and the glaciers do the talking. They're retreating, year over year, in his own archive. Nobody commissioned this. He just kept returning to the ice before it was gone.

05 · Seed · Istanbul

Dursun
Kaplan

Yedikule, Istanbul

Right against the Byzantine walls of Yedikule, twenty-nine gardens still work the same soil generations did. Dursun Kaplan runs one of them, a trade passed from grandfather to father to him, thirty years now. As chairman of the Yedikule Gardeners' Association he grows heirloom vegetables and pushes UNESCO's registration forward at once. "If the gardens end," he says, "the walls end too. History ends."

06 · Hand · Uşak

Şemsi
Sayın

İsalar Village, Uşak

Şemsi Sayın sat down at a kilim loom at six years old in İsalar village and has barely stood up since. Fifty years on, only two kilim shops remain in a district that once had a loom in every house of seventy villages. She still weaves in root dye: madder, oak gall, walnut husk. In December 2025 Turkey named her a Living Human Treasure. "Our daughters don't weave anymore," she says. "The factories opened."

07 · Table · Muş

Muş 100 Kadın
Arıcı

Muş Plain, Eastern Anatolia

On the Muş Plain, in some of Anatolia's richest wildflower country, a hundred women just got ten beehives each. The grant covers 85 percent of the cost; twenty more nomadic beekeepers received full caravans. Most of the hundred had never kept bees before. The plain's honey flora hasn't been mapped and the bees haven't left the hive yet. But for the first time, beekeeping in Muş has a hundred women's names on it.

08 · Wild · Muğla

Prof. Dr. Yakup
Kaska

DEKAMER, Dalyan

In 1988 Yakup Kaska began walking a beach at night, counting loggerhead nests. Today he runs Turkey's only sea-turtle hospital: 367 treated, each one satellite-tagged before release. His team proved something the ocean hadn't said out loud: rising sand temperature is quietly turning nearly every hatchling female. A turtle named Cumhuriyet swam 500 kilometers last year and they tracked every mile of it. Climate change, it turns out, has a gender.

Partner With Us

Open for collaboration.

01 · Production

Co-Produce

Join Season One as a co-producer. Grant co-applications, institutional co-funding, and creative development partnerships for six new episodes in production.

01
02 · Reach

Distribute

Festival licensing, theatrical and event screenings, educational curriculum integration. Four completed films available now. Season One from 2026.

02
03 · Craft

Commission
a Story

Custom documentary production for impact campaigns, institutional communications, or foundation storytelling. We bring the field access, the characters, and the craft.

03
04 · Research

Access the
Network

500+ mapped practitioners across seven regions of Türkiye. Four years of field research, relationships, and data. Open to researchers, NGOs, and policy teams.

04
05 · Values

Brand
Alignment

Ecological brand partnerships with genuine values fit. Not sponsorship placements. Co-authorship of stories that matter to your audience and ours.

05
Start here → partners@regenerativestories.earth

Contact

Get in touch.

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Produced by Junglebased Production.
Based in Turkey.
regenerativestories.earth

© 2026 Regenerative Stories · Junglebased Production