Mendel Hardeman (1977) grew up in a family of Dutch immigrants in the Brazilian interior. His father was a pastor, his mother a social worker who played medieval music in her spare time on the lute. At the age of 12, he discovered the Beatles, with the result that he spent the rest of his youth playing their music and writing songs of their own-in the firm conviction that he would later become a Beatle himself. At the age of 15 he saw a movie for the first time and could not imagine ever working on it himself.
Mendel Hardeman came to the Netherlands to study theology, but after a brief career as a street musician, he landed at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, where he studied composition and music video. He then moved to the Czech Republic, where he was assistant to the legendary surrealist filmmaker Jan Švankmajer.
His short films Caress and Kyrie Eleison (2006) have been screened at many film festivals worldwide; Caress was awarded the Best Video Award at the 2006 Girona Film Festival. In the same year also his long film EXODUS had at the Int. Film Festival in Cork, Ireland, premiere.
In 2007, in the Brazilian interior, his various interests (film, music, social friction, religion, surrealism) came together when he started a project with the people of the sunken city of Canudos. The extraordinary, extraordinary story of this area was made in 7 years in the movie The Sea of the Pilgrim Antonio - a story about life and dreams in the arid Brazilian interior, the place where Mendel feels most at home.
