Water is love: Ripples of regeneration, a journey of hope in a thirsting world
As climate anxiety grows and water crises deepen, Water Is Love: Ripples of Regeneration offers a rare story of hope. The documentary invites viewers to see water not as a resource to be managed, but as a living force connecting soil, people, and spirit.
Produced by Tamera Media, linked to the Tamera ecovillage in Portugal, the film follows young travellers learning from communities in Rajasthan, Kenya, and Portugal who are reviving the “small water cycle”, which is the local circulation of water between land and atmosphere through evaporation, condensation, and rainfall.
When soil and vegetation are healthy, rainwater seeps in, replenishes groundwater, and gradually returns to the atmosphere, maintaining local rainfall and cooler climates. Restoring this cycle means slowing runoff, reviving vegetation, and allowing the land to hold and reuse water naturally.
Premiered online in June 2024, Water Is Love continues to circulate through community screenings during World Water Day and Earth Day events, evolving into a grassroots movement to rekindle humanity’s relationship with water.
The full film can be viewed here at Vimeo
The film’s creative team — Emily Coralyne Bishop, Isabel Rosa (Rosa Pannitschka), and Ludwig Schramm — weave together storytelling, science, and spirit with quiet urgency. Unlike many climate documentaries that dwell on destruction, Water Is Love focuses on renewal. It shows that regeneration is not an abstract ideal but a living process already unfolding wherever people act with care and humility.
Through slow, patient observation, the film captures how restoring water cycles transforms not just soil and vegetation but relationships within communities. Featuring farmers, elders, and water protectors, it reminds viewers that healing the earth begins with healing our relationships with water, land, and one another.
Structure, scenes, storytelling
The film blends science, culture, and lived experience to tell a story of hope and renewal. It explains how the small water cycle works, showing how rain, soil, plants, and evaporation create local climates, while exploring the emotional and spiritual dimensions of our relationship with water.
To make these ideas accessible, the film includes an animated segment titled “How Water Makes Climate”, which explains concepts like evapotranspiration and how restoring local water cycles can help cool the land and stabilise rainfall.
Evapotranspiration is the combined process of water evaporating from soil and water surfaces and being released as vapour from plant leaves. It helps regulate local temperature, humidity, and rainfall. Healthy soil and vegetation sustain this process, maintaining the small water cycle and regional climate balance.
The story then moves across three regions, India, Portugal, and Kenya, where communities are bringing life back to parched landscapes. In India, the film highlights the work of Rajendra Singh and his organisation Tarun Bharat Sangh in Rajasthan. Often called the “Waterman of India”, Singh has helped villagers rebuild traditional johads (earthen ponds), check dams, and percolation tanks, which are age-old systems that capture rainwater and allow it to seep into the ground. Over time, these efforts have recharged wells, revived once-dry rivers like the Arvari, and restored livelihoods in drought-hit villages.
Through simple visuals and grounded storytelling, the film shows villagers digging, bunding, and celebrating the return of flowing water. These acts of collective care go beyond engineering. They rebuild trust and reconnect people to the rhythms of the land. The Indian segment stands out for its message that traditional wisdom, when combined with community action, can revive entire ecosystems without large-scale infrastructure or expensive technology.
In Portugal, the documentary turns to the Tamera community, where land design techniques like swales and terraces slow runoff, increase soil moisture, and regenerate vegetation. In Kenya, it highlights smaller, community-led projects that use regenerative gardens and simple earthworks to manage scarce water and improve food security.
Across these places, the film takes the form of a travelogue and a learning journey. The young travellers meet elders, practitioners, and community members, learning not just methods but values of humility, patience, and respect for natural cycles.
The film’s slow, reflective pace is matched by stunning cinematography. We see dry earth cracking open, rain clouds gathering, green shoots emerging, and people working with quiet determination. These visuals mirror the process of regeneration itself — patient, cyclical, and full of care. Without heavy technical detail or policy talk, Water Is Love leaves audiences with a hopeful message. When people listen to the land and act together, regeneration begins.
Much of the restoration work shown is rural or semi-rural, involving soil, hills, pastoral and farming communities, forests, and community gardens. Less attention is given to urban water management such as stormwater, sewage, infrastructure, or megacities. Including an urban case might widen the film’s appeal and applicability.
India: Ancient wisdom, contemporary urgency
One of the most striking segments of the film is its journey into Rajasthan, where water scarcity has shaped human life for centuries. The Indian case study emphasises community-driven regeneration. Instead of relying on large dams or canals, the film shows how villages have restored water cycles through decentralised efforts.
This resonates with broader Indian experiences under watershed programmes, MGNREGS, and the Jal Shakti Abhiyan, which rely on small-scale, labour-intensive water retention measures. The documentary makes the point that solutions need not be imported. India already holds centuries of water wisdom waiting to be recognised and scaled.
Equally powerful is the intertwining of ecology and spirituality. Viewers see glimpses of rituals, prayers, and community gatherings around water. In India, water is not merely sustenance — it is sacred. The Ganga, Yamuna, Narmada and countless smaller rivers are revered as mothers and deities. When rivers are seen as kin, protecting them becomes both moral and practical. The film captures this ethos beautifully, showing that climate resilience is inseparable from cultural resilience.
At the same time, the documentary avoids romanticising. It acknowledges threats such as industrial over-extraction, erratic monsoons, and unregulated groundwater use that strain India’s aquifers and rivers. The Rajasthan stories push back against this trajectory, showing how even heavily stressed landscapes can recover when community institutions and traditional practices are revived.
For Indian audiences, the resonance is immediate. Whether in Bundelkhand’s parched uplands, Bihar’s flood-prone plains, or the Himalayan springs of Uttarakhand, the underlying lesson is the same. Restoring the small water cycle is as crucial as big-ticket climate policies. By foregrounding India’s grassroots successes, Water Is Love insists that resilience lies not just in national adaptation plans or global agreements, but in the cumulative acts of villages, farmers, women’s collectives, and Indigenous communities working with water as kin.