|
Valdi Ercolani was born in 1939 to farming parents in a small rural community in Rio Grande do Sul, now called Nova Esperança. At the age of seven, his family moved to São Borja, where he worked as a shoeshine, newspaper delivery boy, and projectionist at the local movie theater.
At fourteen, he moved to Porto Alegre to live with the Goulart Macedo family, where he studied graphic arts. At twenty-two, he traveled to Los Angeles, USA, in search of knowledge in advertising creation.
A year later he returned to Brazil and settled in São Paulo, working as an art director at MPM Propaganda. In 1966, he left for Europe, passing through Lisbon and Porto before arriving in Madrid, Spain, where he worked as a screenwriter for advertising films at Estúdios Moro. In 1967, he moved to London to study filmmaking at the London School of Film Technique.
Two years later, in Paris, he worked at the advertising agency Havas Conseil as a creative art director. During this period, he participated in a film script competition for an anti-drug campaign sponsored by the Paris City Hall and was selected as one of the four prize winners.
In 1971, he traveled to Algiers, Algeria. Returning to Brazil in 1972, he founded his own advertising film production company. In 1975, he produced and directed his feature film O Resgate, chosen to represent Latin American cinema at the Tehran Festival in the former Persia.
In 1990, he moved to Barcelona, where he worked in cinematography for two years. In 2000, inspired by the Hero's Journey, he began writing his saga of self-discovery, structured around the five stages of human growth: childhood (Inocencio and the divine child), youth (The awakening of Inocencio), maturity (Inocencio and the start of his Journey), deep maturity (Inocencio in search of the Great Man), and harvest (Inocencio and the forgotten Treasures).
This saga, developed over the past decades, is the synthesis of his personal and creative experience, transformed into universal literature on self-knowledge and the search for meaning.
|
