“Friedrich introduces himself as an important new voice in realist and contemporary European cinema.”

Premiering in this year’s Berlinale Panorama section is I Understand Your Displeasure, the first fiction feature from German director Kilian Armando Friedrich. Carrying many of the sensibilities associated with filmmakers like the Dardenne brothers, Cristian Mungiu, and Ken Loach, the film adopts a tense realist mode that portrays the unglamorous labor of people working in the cleaning service industry. It’s a film about work that is invisible to most of its beneficiaries: cleaning, scheduling, managing, covering shifts, apologizing to clients, and pleasing everyone. It demonstrates how emotionally and physically draining this work becomes when it is done under constant pressure without respite. With this first narrative feature, Friedrich introduces himself as an important new voice in realist and contemporary European cinema.

The film follows Heike (a fantastic Sabine Thalau), a mid-level customer service manager at a cleaning company that services offices and commercial spaces after hours. Her job is to mediate between clients, upper management, and the cleaning staff who do the actual physical labor. However, as just mid-level, Heike is faced with both the tasks of managing and being the backbone of the cleaning duties. Early on, her attempt to encourage a worker from a key subcontractor to work for her instead triggers a chain reaction. The subcontractor threatens to cut ties with the cleaning company unless Heike secures more hours and revenue for him. Further, he no longer wants to have his subcontracting company or people work at some of the most thankless locations, such as at nursing homes.  What follows is a squeeze on labor, a shortage of personnel, and an intensification of Heike’s already crushing workload. 

The film does not present this as a single crisis but as a system of increasing pressure.  One compromise leads to another.  Each decision that Heike has no control over makes her life even more difficult.  For instance, one of her employees has a sick child, and on what is already a challenging day, Heike must now work in order to cover the shift of the employee.  Her day was already exhausting and non-stop, and she had been looking for a momentary break.  Instead, she has to emotionally beg her employee to come in and even beseech the woman to bring the sick child and leave her in the corner while her mother works.  Heike then also must beg another employee who had not received his promised pay to come to work.  Despite this, neither employee comes in.  This was going to be a special evening for Heike, but instead she tirelessly goes back to work and covers the shift.  Friedrich presents this sequence not only as a realistic portrayal but as a damning criticism of companies and corporations that want to save every cent they can instead of hiring a workforce which has a quality-of-life schedule and can afford to cover when employees are unavailable.  The film becomes political in how it condemns the lack of empathy by companies for their employees and also of the consumers who benefit from the work of those employees.

Heike is constantly in motion. She micromanages not because she is power-hungry, but because she has no other option. Although she technically occupies a managerial role, she works alongside non-management employees every day. She is placed between contradicting demands: the cost-cutting orders of upper management, the complaints and expectations of clients, and the needs of workers who are already stretched thin. She must schedule shifts, negotiate contracts, handle customer relations, clean, and manage interpersonal conflicts among employees. It is exhausting simply to watch her navigate these demands and Thalau portrays these moments with perfection. The film understands what many do not, that middle managers in service industries are often crushed from both ends and have the most draining and debilitating positions. They carry all of the stress and expectations of those above them while absorbing the anger and desperation of those below them.  Heike’s exhaustion is not a personal or professional failure; it is the inevitable outcome of structural pressures that leave no room to care about her as a human.

Friedrich’s interest in this world comes from lived experience. He has spoken about working alongside a housekeeper who also ran a cleaning company, witnessing firsthand how personnel shortages and logistical demands consumed her life. That background shapes the film’s attention to detail with the rhythms of work, the demands of customer service, and the compromises required to keep operations running. This is not just observational realism, but it is realism born from a true proximity and familiarity with the service and cleaning industry that rarely receives honest dignity.

Friedrich’s first feature, documentary Nuclear Nomads (co-directed with Tizian Stromp Zargari), portrayed the lives of workers who clean nuclear reactors. His themes and interests in real people continue with I Understand Your Displeasure.  And not surprisingly, much of the cast comes from non-professional acting backgrounds, which adds to the film’s authenticity. He treats his performers not as raw material but as collaborators. He used a script but allowed room for improvisation, for speech patterns to remain natural, and for reactions to emerge organically. The result is not performative but a true authenticity that permeates throughout the film. The characters feel embedded in their work environments and honest with the emotions they portray. They aren’t like staged Hollywood actors who would feel completely out of place. 

Stylistically, Friedrich commits to physical proximity, much like in films by the Dardenne brothers. The camera stays close to Heike, almost tethered to her movement. Friedrich and his cinematographers Louis Dickhaut and Frederik Seeberger use this handheld framing to deny the viewer any comfortable distance. There are no wide establishing shots to situate the world as a whole, no aerial views of the company, no visual relief from the immediacy of her labor. This choice is not aesthetic minimalism for its own sake; it is ethical positioning. The audience is not allowed to observe Heike from afar. We are made to inhabit her exhaustion and to experience the relentlessness of her life. Often, those in the audience are the same consumers of the products and services that the workers provide, and without their recognition of the inequity in the system they support there can be no betterment in the lives of those working people.

What makes I Understand Your Displeasure resonate is not that it exposes exploitation, but that it stays with the daily grind of compromise. The film is about people who are not heroic in any conventional sense, but who are simply going about their daily lives. Heike’s struggle is not framed as singular or exceptional. It is emblematic of a systemic condition. 

Importantly Friedrich does not sentimentalize her labor, nor does he reduce the film to any sort of poverty porn. The film holds onto the humanity of Heike and the other characters. The film doesn’t propose reform, nor does it have any preachy political scenes. It simply bears witness to the hardship of working life under contemporary capitalism.

With I Understand Your Displeasure, Friedrich announces himself as a highly skilled new director, not through flashy spectacle, but through precision and attention.  He skillfully presents the story of workers who are rarely visible or rarely shown. I Understand Your Displeasure is a fiction debut that doesn’t try to dazzle but instead succeeds on its realism and authenticity. It’s one of the highlights of this year’s Berlinale. 

(c) Image copyright: Louis Dickhaut & Frederik Seeberger / WennDann Film