Aggregat
Aggregate
Marie Wilke
Fragments from a country undergoing evolution: Aggregate gathers observations from Germany in 2016 and 2017. SPD parliamentarians in a training workshop. A BILD newspaper editorial team meeting. An art-themed guided tour of the Reichstag. A TV report by station MDR. A crowd chanting »the lying press«. Marie Wilke’s clear-visioned concept delivers focused camera work, hard cuts and cuts to black – forming a contemporary account of the times. Aggregate is not a story. The film is a collection of images, impressions and fragments of the current political and media scene in democratic Germany.
»It was important to me that the film remains open and does not offer any patterns of explanation. Aggregate doesn’t want to be evidence for any particular view of things. It’s up to each viewer how to relate the individual fragments to each other. (…) Documentary observation of concrete events and actions opens my eyes for abstract constructs like democracy, society and institution. By viewing the concrete situations, I also become aware of my own role within the construct of society and of the necessity to position myself. The starting-point of my last film Staatsdiener (public servant) was the question of how people, as police officers, implement the abstract idea of state power. One starting-point for Aggregate, too, was the tension between the ideal of democracy and the real interplay of human factors in society. Communication is the connection between these parts.«
– Marie Wilke in conversation with Birgit Kohler (Berlinale Forum)
Marie Wilke
Marie Wilke was born in Berlin in 1974. She studied at the ZeLIG School for Documentary, Television and New Media in Bolzano (Italy) from 1996 to 1999. In 2004, she completed studies in Experimental Media Design at Berlin University of the Arts. Subsequently, she was a member of the artistic staff for the Documentary Directing degree course at the Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf until 2014. Since 2000, Marie Wilke has worked as a writer, director and editor for documentary films and television, and as a freelance lecturer in directing and story development at various film schools and institutes. Aggregate is her second full-length film.
Films by Marie Wilke
Staatsdiener 2015 | Berlin eins dunkel 2005 | Con anima e corpo 2000