Valdi Ercolani was born to farming parents in 1939 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. There, he worked as a shoeshine, a paper delivery boy, and a projectionist at the local movie theater. At fourteen, he went to live with the Goulart Macedo family in Porto Alegre, where he studied graphic arts. At twenty-two, he traveled to Los Angeles, USA, in search of knowledge in the field of advertising creation.

He returned a year later and settled in São Paulo, where he worked as an art director at MPM Propaganda. In 1966, he went to Europe, passing through Lisbon and Porto, and then 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. In 1969, he moved to Paris and worked at the advertising agency Havas Conseil as a creative art director. During this time, he participated in a film script competition for an anti-drug campaign promoted by the Paris City Hall and was one of the four prize winners.

In 1971, he traveled to Algiers, Algeria. He returned to Brazil in 1972 and founded his own advertising film production company. In 1975, he produced and directed his feature film, O Resgate, which was 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 to write his saga of self-discovery, consisting of five stages of human growth: childhood (Inocêncio 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).