Biography
Frank Wierke was born in 1968 in Unna, Westphalia. He studied at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Dortmund until 2001. He graduated with the 29-minute essay film "La mer - Ein Film in punktierter Linie". After that he started working as a freelance filmmaker. For ZDF/3sat he realized together with Beate Middeke the feature-length TV documentary "Man denkt, man kennt das Land" (2002), for which the two accompanied everyday life on a family-run farm for a year.
After the short films "Da zwischen sind wir" (2004) and "Dickinson Bargfeld Schmidt" (2005), which won prizes at the Blicke - Filmfestival des Ruhrgebiets, he made the documentary "Michael Hamburger - Ein englischer Dichter aus Deutschland" (2007, again for ZDF/3sat and the Goethe-Institut), which won the Arte Documentary Film Prize and was awarded the Prize for Historical Culture at the Blicke Film Festival. For the documentary "Sterne" (2010), he accompanied the pop band Die Sterne for a year. According to one critic, the film was "not a music film, but one about growing old in pop music, about problems with record companies and producers, about the 'deconstruction of pop myths' (Wierke)."
Over the next few years, Wierke made other essayistic documentaries, including "Solreven - Sonnenfuchs" (2017), about the Norwegian nature lyricist Kjartan Hatløy. His documentary "Verabredungen mit einem Dichter - Michael Krüger," made over the course of about nine years, premiered at Munich's DOK.fest in May 2022. The theatrical release was in September 2022.