Hans-Martin Liebing met Johnny Pate in Summer of 2003. He was in graduate film school at UCLA at the time and preparing to shoot a Native American feature in Texas and had temporarily moved back to Austin. The story to the feature had literally come to him in a dream. It was a story about a young Native American lawyer living in Los Angeles that got called back to the deathbed of her mother, a Native American activist living in a small town in West Texas, who reluctantly takes over her mother’s last project, protecting a medicine wheel from falling prey to the construction of a shopping center and in the process rediscovers her Native American roots. Casting the film he met a number of Native Americans living in Texas and was introduced to a medicine man who he became close friends with. Together they embarked on a journey of preparing a feature that was literally happening on Indian time - so much in fact that after about 6 months in Texas, going from Pow Wow to Pow Wow to look for actors and make new friends, he decided to postpone the shoot and to move back to California to finish his degree at UCLA.

Johnny walks sunset

During the preparations for the film Hans was introduced to Choctaw Chickasaw artist Johnny Pate by Austin filmmaker Christopher Morse. Johnny told Hans about the story of the paintings he had done 6 months before 9/11 happened. The paintings showed New York on fire and airplanes flying into the World Trade Center. When 9/11 happened, Johnny was traumatized since, after all, he had seen the events in his mind and painted them and he was asking himself if there was anything he could have done to prevent what had happened in New York in the fall of 2001. Haunted by dreams of the end-times, Johnny remembered the stories he was told by his father growing up, in particular the tales about the origins and the end of our world. As a kid his father had taken Johnny and his sisters on extensive trips through the Indian reservations of the Southwest and had taught them how to live self-sufficient and simple lives in harmony with the earth. His father, at the time, was working for the EPA, identifying and shutting down plants and installations that were environmental hazards. At the pinnacle of his career he died - suddenly and unexpectedly. The exact cause of his death is unknown and Johnny to this day suspects that it was somehow related to his father’s last assignments.

Shamans Kiva J Shadow

In 2005 Johnny had a series of visions about the end-times and started painting again. Recalling a number of Native American prophecies his father and uncles had told him about, he decided to return to the reservations to talk to elders and medicine men about how they were seeing the future of humankind. Intrigued by Johnny’s plans, Hans asked Johnny if he could document his trip and called German filmmaker and former UCLA classmate Tore Schmidt, at the time living in Berlin, if he wanted to accompany the two of them on this adventurous road trip and to help document Johnny Pate’s journey. A few weeks later, Tore stepped off a plane at DFW airport and the two filmmakers packed their film equipment into Johnny’s Land Rover and the three of them hit the road. Little did they know about the life-changing journey they were about to embark on —