Dr Heinz Valentin Hampejs was born in Vienna in 1941 and took his PhD at the medical department of Vienna University.

As a young doctor of neurology and psychiatry in various hospitals in Austria and Germany he was confronted by the inefficiency of the drugs used to treat psychiatric and psychosomatic disorders. In his view the aim of orthodox Western medicine s not the healing of patients but the life-long suppression of symptoms through medication. He eventually found this situation unbearable and began to look for alternative methods of treatment.

This first led to intensive studies of the literature and in 1972 and 1975 to two ethno-medical expeditions to Mexico, where he made informative contact with shamans of the Otomies and Zapatecs. In 1978 he took part in an expedition to the Peruvian Amazon, where for six months he was schooled by four shamans in numerous healing rituals of the jungle liana Ayahuasca. In 1980 Dr Hampejs completed his specialist training in neurology and psychiatry, and a year later resumed his research into shamanistic medicine in South America. On behalf of the Ecuadorian Ministry of Public Health he produced a didactic monograph on "The Shamanic Ecstatic Consciousness - Central Principle of Shamanistic Medicine" in 1991.

Since 1992 he has been giving shamanistic healing and self-realisation seminars with the power plants of Indio-American shamanism in South America. As a result of his research Dr Valentin Hampejs specialises in the shamanistic healing of drug addiction, alcoholism, multiple sclerosis and endogenous depression - with extraordinary successes after only three or four weeks.

Against this background the film portrays the shamanistic researcher Dr H. Valentin Hampejs in Venezuela and shows one of his annual Christmas and New Year seminars with participants from Germany, Austria and Venezuela.

The film has no commentary and uses only live sound of the protagonists and authentic material spoken off-screen by actors, Music and other sounds accompany the images, which include footage of an ascent of the legendary Mt Roraima.