KAN VATAN — Blood at the Roots

Hatay Province, 2013.

The Yılmaz family has tended their olive grove for seven generations. Now a blight is killing the ancient trees. But Davut, the aging patriarch, is lost to dementia. And his son Kaan is lost to his finance career in Manhattan. The family’s future depends on the daughter, Sezen.

When an American agribusiness claims to have a cure, Sezen signs a contract behind her father’s back. Kaan, meanwhile, trades on the inside information about the firm’s secret new product — losing his job and visa. On his way back to Turkey for the first time in years, the enraged older brother reveals Sezen’s secret deal to Davut, driving the old man to the edge.

Across the border in Syria, a CIA asset named Abe discovers the horrific nature of his mission. He kills his handler and escapes back over the mountains into Turkey. With the CIA now hunting the rogue agent, Abe disguises himself as a Syrian migrant and finds work on an ailing olive grove in Hatay.

By the time Sezen learns the true identity of her new laborer, she realizes she needs his help defending the land against threats on every side: the foreign company, the CIA, and even her own family.

When violence finally breaks out in the grove, blood seeps into the roots. And, despite the spreading blight, the trees begin to grow again.

The Characters

SEZEN YILMAZ

Daughter of the Land

The one who stayed. She gave up her foreign studies when her mother died to take care of her father. But now that her father is sick, she takes care of everything. With the blight sweeping through and her brother unavailable to help, she’s the only one left to protect the trees. And she’s done waiting for permission.

KAAN YILMAZ

The Son Who Left

With a dream job at a New York hedge fund, he swore he’d never return to the family grove. But after tragedy strikes, he’s forced to come home. And he’ll stay for the war.

ABE

The Nomad

After a mission takes him across the border into Syria, the mysterious American operative comes face to face with the dark heart of humanity. When he turns on his CIA handlers, he has nowhere to go. So he disguises himself as a laborer and finds work on the Yılmaz grove. While he connects with the land in a way Kaan never could, his secrets carry a burden that will put them all at risk.

Tone & Influences

Kan Vatan merges the geopolitical thriller with the Turkish cinematic tradition — Homeland’s paranoid urgency meets the contemplative dread of Nuri Bilge Ceylan, where modern investigations excavate centuries of buried violence. The aesthetic draws from neo-Western noir like Sicario and No Country for Old Men: border zones where law dissolves and violence follows ancient rules. The family-and-land stakes evoke Yellowstone — a dynasty fighting to hold territory against outside forces. The supernatural elements echo Anatolian folk horror — land that remembers, trees that grow from blood, cycles that repeat across empires.

Context

Operation Timber Sycamore

Inspired by Operation Timber Sycamore — the covert CIA program that armed Syrian rebel groups through private contractors. Weapons meant for moderate rebels ended up in the hands of jihadist groups — some connected to bombings on Turkish soil. The border region became a pipeline of weapons, money, and moral compromise.

Hatay Province

Set in Hatay Province, one of the oldest continuously inhabited regions on earth — conquered by Hittites, Romans, Crusaders, Ottomans. The olive trees here can live thousands of years. Their roots connect underground across vast distances. And they can literally fuse with foreign wood through grafting — ancient and new growth becoming one organism.

Cain & Abel

At its core, Kan Vatan is a Cain and Abel story. The farmer who abandoned his land. The nomad who killed a man. And the question of whose blood the soil accepts.

Why Co-Production

Turkish drama is the second most exported television in the world — $600M+ annually, 170+ countries, 750 million viewers. Everywhere except America. The barrier is simple: Americans don’t watch subtitles at scale.

Kan Vatan solves this by design. Drawing on the model of international co-productions like Narcos and Shōgun, the story embeds American characters — a CIA operative, a Turkish-American son raised in the States, an international corporation — so that 40–50% of dialogue is naturally English through premise, not contrivance.

Turkish production quality rivals anything on American cable. The talent, the crews, the locations are world-class. What’s been missing is the right packaging for the US market. Kan Vatan is built to be that bridge.

About the Writer

Written by Max Coyne-Green. Max lives in Turkey for months each year with his wife’s Turkish family, and is deeply immersed in Turkish history, culture, and mythical storytelling traditions. Before writing full-time, he spent a decade managing research for hedge funds and tech companies—experience that directly shapes the institutional machinery driving the story’s conflicts.

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