9th Raider Director and Filmmaker Reveals How Hopi Prophecy Set The Stage For Historic Film and NFTs.
About The Story: The year is 2037. Humans have reached a crossroads for survival after 8 events that have turned the world into nearly a wasteland. A man buries his daughter in a survival pod in the desert to protect her from the doom that was coming and searches for her for years after a major nuclear holocaust. The 9th Raider is set to arrive, and the survivors are forced to choose a new path or face absolute extinction.
The story is set in the post-apocalyptic time period of 2037. Surviving Humans scavenge for resources in a hostile world. 8th Raiders have scorched the earth and “The 9th Raider” “is yet to come. Legends tell of the Hopi Indian Prophecy being an omen for the final survival of the human population. Hope comes when a survivor discovers a crypto network that left behind a digital-powered ark to save humanity.
Director/Filmmaker: Dallas Santana Founder of Crypto fund MMF ( Momentum Media Fund), Momentum Studios, and NFT Blue.
Director’s Background:
I was raised by a European mother who was both a journalist and a part-time professor of Native American Studies. By age 11, I had already been on many interview sessions with Wampanoag Native Tribal leaders, watching close by as my mother developed relationships with native leaders and passionately sought to bring their stories to the surface. She took me along on her journalistic adventures, exploring with her great locations like the Narranganset’s “great swamp”, the battle scene of King Philip’s Indian-American war, where the last of the Narraganset Indians had been forced to live and survive deep in a swamp.
My father was raised by his grandfather, a very strict Choctaw and Chickasaw Indian. At age 15. he ran away from home and entered world war 2 in the US Army, and traveled all the way through the Pacific Combat Theater without getting caught being underage by his superiors. His father also joined two weeks later and enter combat as well in the Pacific. Days after the Japanese surrendered, my father’s unit was headed for Hiroshima, the site of the world’s second-only nuclear bomb ever detonated on a civilian population. Riding up in Army trucks and jeeps to the post-apocalyptic-like city with his unit, he saw firsthand the Armageddon-like destruction of an entire city and its 80,000 inhabitants.
One winter night when I was only 5 my father called me out of bed into the living room to tell me a story he felt was important to teach me about the world of humans. He had many, but this one and the only story he had to get out of his heart and soul were about Hiroshima, it deeply pained him as he released the story before us telling us a few of the details. Later in life as I spent over a decade researching his story of being raised by a grandfather who was Choctaw-Chickasaw, I began to reach a deep grief-filled bowl of empathy to grasp his heartbreaking moments when arriving in Hiroshima to see Japanese children who looked much like the Indian blood children he grew up with as a child; now their homes destroyed by an atom bomb, homeless, starving without food for weeks, suffering from burns and radiation sickness, and now parentless. My father like a whole generation of veterans and civilians suffering from soul-shattering PTSD ( Post Traumatic Stress Disorder), never spoke ever again about any of his combat experiences, not even one.
My Father, Became One of the Only Americans to Ever witness Nuclear Bombed Hiroshima. He was just 15 years old.
That winter evening was one that I have retained for my whole life journey. A year before my mother died in 2020, I got to have my mother record her last video recordings with me where she explained to me for the first time the pain told my father to my mother and his experience arriving in Hiroshima and witnessing these parentless children with radiation sickness and body burns when he was only 15. She said that tore him to pieces and left him utterly breaking down in tears there in Japan. She also relayed the story of my father being raised by his mixed Choctaw/Chickasaw Grandfather, it was an important link to history and cultural history I wanted to know. When my mother passed this final story to me about child survivors in a horrific wasteland destroyed by human hands, I knew my next chapter of storytelling had begun. The 9th Raider was born. A fictional story about a young girl surviving in a world brought to the point of extinction.
How an Insensitive Cultural Snafu by Victoria's Secret Led to My First Hollywood Project To Include Native American Talent.
Native American Actor/Activist Saginaw Grant. Truly made the night watching him lead the Native American models out to the runway at Fashion Week LA’s California Dreaming show as we witness history with Native American models getting to walk at Fashion Week in their own presentation. Saginaw played Chief Big Bear in Johnny Depp’s movie “The Lone Ranger”.
Course Correction My company Momentum Studios
So when I too arrived to create a career in the arts in Hollywood I remembered the native community and tried to support people who are taken advantage of by powerful coercive forces. When Victoria's Secret made a big snafu and suffered a backlash for having models wear Native American ceremonial headdresses in their runway shows, my own company stepped in and sponsored an entire runway show filled with native American models only during Fashion Week LA.
When Hawaiian indigenous people were thrown off their land, and my friend started a documentary “A Voice For Sovereignty” I offered her to come to my post-production house and gather up all footage I had filmed in Hawaii over the previous decade after I was personally blessed by Hawaiian indigenous Kahuna leaders on sacred sites I was allowed to visit on my film trips to Hawaii. The documentary went on to win 11 international film awards and be recognized by the indigenous community.
2010, Best Documentary Film — The American Indian Movement International (AIM) Film Festival
And this led to me ultimately being asked to come out and film Dennis Banks, the award-winning iconic leader of the American Indian Movement and actor and joining them as a documentary filmmaker on “The Longest Walk” an annual event where walkers representing tribes walk across America and gather at the Lincoln Memorial for a final rally for native American justice. This ultimately was a spiritual experience for me on so many levels as I began to understand the cultural experiences I had with my father and my mother too, ultimately led to a sincere passion for helping and connecting to the activism that was necessary to stand up for voices that often were not heard.
AIM Banks 1972
Dennis Banks, field director for the American Indian Movement, right, and Vernon Bellecourt, another Indian leader, announce that Indians will be allowed to hold religious services in Arlington National Cemetery to honor their war dead buried there, Nov. 5, 1972, in Washington. The announcement came after an appellate court reversed a District Court ruling which barred the action. (AP Photo/Jim Palmer)
Marlon Brando, right, talks with Dennis Banks, leader of the American Indian Movement, aka AIM, at a news conference at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York, Nov. 26, 1974. Brando used the press conference to denounce government injustices to Native Americans. On March 27, 1973, the actor Marlon Brando declined the Academy Award for Best Actor for his career-reviving performance in The Godfather. The Native American actress Sacheen Littlefeather attended the ceremony in Brando’s place, stating that the actor “very regretfully” could not accept the award, as he was protesting Hollywood’s portrayal of Native Americans in film. (AP Photo/Marty Lederhandler)
I had been working on post-apocalyptic genre screenplays for over a decade, and eco-conscious stories while creating and directing TV series for CBS, ABC, Fox, Fox Sports, Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Prime, and networks around the world. Admiring projects like Avatar and even Mad Max, which portrayed how humans could end up in the future-facing the ultimate survival. So naturally, with what I already knew and felt a connection to, I felt a story that showed humanity at the crossroads of survival or regeneration was an important story to bring out. The Hopi prophecy was a great framework for that and I felt a deep connection to putting its message up on the screen. The movie is not directly about Native experiences but rather the fictional experiences of characters in the story mostly those characters who ignored the Hopi Omens and messaging and some of the greatest teachings of indigenous cultures, some of which are quite valuable for our survival.
Trailer Online and Website: Click Here
NFT Information site: Click Here
Studios: M Digital Studios, Inc. Click Here To Connect Online
Shooting days to date: 40+ Cryptocurrency/NFT partnerships: Ark.io, Originprotocol.com, Crypto.com. BQTX.io. AIP ( South Korea), KBH ( South Korea), AMF ( South Korea), USA-based Airwire.io, and more.
NFT Rights Managed by: NFT Blue
Originally published at https://nftblue.medium.com on December 26, 2021.
