Biography
Eden Hadad is an Israeli Yemenite-Libyan immigrant and a disabled writer and director. Influenced by his upbringing and his joyful point of view, Hadad is a dark comedy genre-bending filmmaker that cares deeply for his characters' hearts.
In 2010, after finishing his mandatory military service, where he collaborated closely with the Mossad and the Shabak, Hadad enrolled at the Sam Spiegel Film School in Jerusalem. Upon graduation in 2015, Hadad received three national grants to complete "The Disposers," which he directed and co-wrote. Since premiering at the 2016 Raindance Film Festival in London, Hadad's film has won and played at more than 50 film festivals worldwide, including Santa Barbara, Boston, and Sonoma. The short was later sold to Israel's most prestigious movie channel, YES5.
Later in 2016, Hadad received a merit-based grant that made it possible for him to attend the MFA Film program in screenwriting & directing at Columbia University in New York, where he has developed his feature scripts and TV projects. In 2021, when he was still a student, Hadad directed "The Stunt Double," a short, serialized narrative podcast produced by Fictionz. Upon graduation in early 2022, Hadad was selected to be part of the inaugural program named 1IN4, which supports disabled creatives as published in Variety. A month later, Hadad was selected as a fellow of the 2022 RespectAbility Entertainment Lab, as published in The Hollywood Reporter. Being an advocate for the creative disabled community, Hadad's proudest professional achievement to this day, is the fact that he helped make Warner Bros' Writers' Workshop more accessible to writers with learning disability and dyslexia.
When he was 12 years old, Hadad was diagnosed as neurodivergent and was prescribed Methylphenidate. The doctors explained that for his brain to feel "normal," he'll need to pop a pill every four hours for the rest of his life. Thankfully, Hadad discovered cinema at that same age - which was the only drug he ever needed. A high-school dropout with an MFA diploma from an Ivy League University, Hadad has been using his "abnormal" brain for writing, directing and producing. Creating characters and worlds that only he can come up with, Eden is using all the mental baggage that he carries from his childhood and his army days so that he can lift the audience with his specific humor and cinematic tone.
