25/02/2026 - BERLINALE 2026: The filmmaker explores Germany’s cleaning sector, highlighting its isolation due to systemic injustice in low-wage jobs

(© Frederik Seeberger)

We spoke to Kilian Armando Friedrich, the director of I Understand Your Displeasure [+see also:
film review
interview: Kilian Armando Friedrich
film profile], which screened in the Panorama strand of this year’s Berlinale, about the film’s core elements.

Cineuropa: This film was based on your own experience in the cleaning sector. What made you choose it as the subject of your first feature years later?
Kilian Armando Friedrich: I was shaped by the region I come from at the French–German border, long marked by a major coal and steel industry. There was always a spirit of “the good old days”, because these industries closed during my childhood. I became interested in how economies reinvent themselves to restore profitability, and which inequalities and injustices are involved in the process of transforming an industrial economy into a service-based one. This also leads to the big low-wage sector we have in Germany today and to many political decisions that formed the reality of people in today's cleaning sector.

I didn’t grow up in that environment, but the months I worked in it showed me what a complex system the sector actually is. I became interested in this work system that exists to keep prices low. I discovered this unique job - the cleaning manager - that many people don’t even know exists. They’re not regular cleaners: they plan schedules, step in when people are ill, and handle delicate interpersonal situations with both customers and cleaners to keep the system running. I think this is an interesting job that has developed in the last thirty years, and it has a conflict in itself: to satisfy needs that contradict each other.

You had started writing the film with a colleague from the sector who later took her own life. How did that impact you?
This film developed in my mind for over ten years before I got it done; I carried it with me. And when that happened it made it more urgent for me to tell this story, to say that everyone needs to look out for one another, also at work. Many people in this sector develop psychological problems. It would be great for these companies to create shared moments together. As a company, you also have a responsibility to bring moments of joy to your employees, but the low-wage sector often overlooks basic needs. People are left on their own: everyone cleans alone.

Your main actress Sabine Thalau comes from the sector and is a non-professional actress. What did your relationship with her add to the film?
Sabine is a great and intelligent person and I was really happy to work with her. She did this job for fifteen years and she recognised that things were not going well. She was able to reflect on her situation, which is important when you play a character so close to your own life. The audience had to feel this sense of breathless running, so I could not work with a character who is smiling and happy, even though that is how Sabine actually is. She had to do actor training with me, and it was tough because she had to go into her own wounds, as smiling was a sort of protective wall because she hasn’t had an easy life herself. Her best compliment to me is that she wants to keep making films. Maybe we’ll work together again one day, but for now her experience shows you’re never too old to try something new.

Your film is very political but also intimate. Did you see it first as a personal story, a political community film, or both?
I don’t think they contradict each other. The personal is political. You spend ninety minutes with a person you might ignore in real life. Cinema gives you the possibility to watch someone in a safe space, you are like a voyeur. This creates responsibility in the viewer. I am influenced by neorealistic cinema and, for me, it is important that there is no wall between you and the person on screen. When you leave the cinema and see someone like that person on screen the next day, you cannot see them in the same way anymore. That can challenge you in an ethical way, and I think that is deeply political.

Finally, is there anything you are working on now?
Both projects are still at the treatment stage. One is called “Die Reise”, the “trip”, and it tells the story of a child who gets taken by their own parent. Some families, when they get into trouble with the state, leave the country with their child, basically kidnapping them. The film would be about this trip across European borders, while the child asks more and more questions and develops their own agency. The other project is about what happens to love when one partner gets really sick. In Germany we have many people with long COVID - ME/CFS and related illnesses who are not able to work and often are confined to bed. They become invisible, but you can learn a lot from people who cope with serious illness in their daily lives. The story’s questions are: what happens to love when care lacks a social infrastructure? How does love change when the focus shifts from shared moments to the burden of care?