Berlinale 2026: Everyone’s Sorry Nowadays | Interview with Frederike Migom

Tegenwoordig heet iedereen Sorry (Everyone’s Sorry Nowadays) is a tender coming-of-age film by Belgian director Frederike Migom, showing at the 76th Berlinale as part of the Generation 14plus section. Set at the threshold of childhood and adulthood, it follows Bianca, a teenage girl negotiating divorced parents, shifting loyalties and the complicated intensity of looking up to adults who seem to have everything figured out.

This film is warm, emotionally precise and attuned to the everyday dramas of adolescence and is less interested in issues than in the textures of feeling, the half-said apologies and the gaps between what adults promise and what they deliver.

Director Frederike Migom loves to work and create her films for younger audiences. “This world of young people is not a new detour but an ongoing cinematic terrain. I love being part of Berlinale’s Generation because it programs films exploring the lives of young people rather than just films for kids,” she adds. “Such stories lose something when forced into a box. They are just films that will find their audience of whatever age.”

The project began with a book that came to her via her aunt, at a time when Migom was immersed in writing something entirely different. Reading it was an immediate jolt of recognition: she saw herself in Bianca’s restless interior life, in that impatient desire to grow up and become a real person, as she remembers feeling as a teenager. “The novel was very much written as a film; adapting it was an instant decision,” she adds. “I am fascinated with the minds of young people and how they deal with all those feelings and how they must sort of figure out which person they’re going to be, and the book offered a ready-made yet complex blueprint for that exploration,” she further adds.

The film’s main element is highlighting the young protagonist Bianca’s relationship to adults, crystallised by her infatuation with the enigmatic Billy King, a figure who becomes a screen for aspiration and projection rather than a flesh-and-blood person. Frederike states that she recalls that as a child, she too was infatuated with adults, longing to be near them, to become them, to be cool like them, etc. In the film, this dynamic is rendered with sensitivity and wit, where the adult world is not demonised but gently punctured, its glamour stripped away to reveal ordinary, imperfect people who say “sorry” far more often than they mean it. That feeling of empty repetition of apology gives the film its distinctive, slightly odd full title, preserved from the book.

The title points to Bianca’s recent past, a year of her parents’ divorce, a barrage of sympathetic noises and assurances that things will be fine, yet a persistent sense that nobody is listening. “Nowadays, everyone has been saying sorry, but nobody’s actually been…” she trails off, implying the superficiality and shallowness of these gestures. The film turns that gap, the distance between the spoken apology and the unacknowledged hurt, into one of its central emotional tensions.

The director is cautious about declaring this generation more mature; she sees instead a split: maybe online they mature faster because they encounter far more content earlier, but at the same time they might lose a bit of resilience with everything so easily accessible.

The film does not position itself as a sociological thesis, but it trusts that certain experiences like confusion, longing, and the need to be seen remain universal, crossing both borders and generational lines. She hopes, “whatever generation, in the end, still feels what they feel and has to deal with it,” and she adds that this emotional labour continues to bind audiences to stories like Bianca’s.

Our team is on the ground at the 76th Berlin International Film Festival, running from February 12th to 22nd, 2026.