Pilot Project
The River Remains
Water Scarcity and the Intersectional Burden on Rural Labor in the Sakarya-Sapanca Basin, Turkey
The Sakarya River Basin is one of Turkey's most heavily industrialized watersheds. For decades, communities living along its banks have documented contamination, displacement, and ecological collapse. Their testimony is precise. It does not appear in any official monitoring database. It does not qualify as evidence in regulatory frameworks.
The River Remains is Nexus Points Doc's flagship forensic documentary — an investigation into what happens when the data doesn't exist.
The Documentary
The River Remains follows Hediye — a woman in her sixties who has raised livestock on the same land her mother farmed before her. For fifteen years, her animals have been getting sick. She has filed complaints. Nothing has come back. The contamination surrounding her pastures does not appear in any official database.
The film documents the gap between what institutions record and what communities live — tracing how Data Silence operates not as an absence, but as an active political condition. Through Hediye's story, The River Remains asks: whose knowledge counts as evidence, and who decides?
The documentary is currently under strategic festival embargo, in preparation for its world premiere at a leading international documentary festival.
Methodology
The River Remains was produced through a hybrid forensic and ethnographic methodology — combining high-resolution satellite imagery analysis via Planet Labs, open-source intelligence, air quality data integration through OpenAQ, and sustained community-based fieldwork.
All forensic outputs are SHA-signed and machine-readable. The project's research integrity is upheld by an International Advisory Board of 27 scholars from Yale, Columbia, Oxford, Goldsmiths, and Forensic Architecture.
Interactive StoryMap
Explore our comprehensive visual research through our interactive StoryMap, featuring field photography, documentary footage, scientific data, and community testimonies.
View StoryMapProject Attributes
Status
Under Strategic Festival Embargo — World Premiere Forthcoming
Format
Feature Documentary
Location
Sakarya-Sapanca Basin, Turkey
Advisory
27-member International Advisory Board
Supported by
National Geographic Society · The Nature Conservancy
This project is the foundation of Nexus Points Doc's broader Forensic Truth-Infrastructure — a replicable methodology for documenting ecological evidence in regions where official data is systematically absent or suppressed. The River Remains is the first deployment. The Youth Sentinels Global Fellowship is the next.