Frederike Migom finished her second feature, Everyone’s Sorry Nowadays, on a Friday and premiered it at the Berlinale days later, in the Generation Kplus strand, where it was nominated for the Crystal Bear. The film follows Bianca, a thirteen-year-old who feels invisible inside a household coming apart, until a chance summer-day meeting with her favorite actress, Billie King, a figure who works less as a person than as a screen for the girl’s longing, sends her tumbling through her own imagination toward something like a self. The episode’s title is a piece of advice Migom carries from a mentor. It is also, in her telling, the most honest description of what making a film actually is.
Fear Is Not the Obstacle, It Is the Job
“Feel the fear, do it anyway” usually sounds like a poster in a guidance counselor’s office. Migom means something more exact: filmmaking is the act of asking other people to fund a certainty you do not have. Notice how the fear keeps recurring in her story, always in the same shape. She couldn’t call herself a director for years, not until a film of hers got funded.
There’s a group of people that sit around a table and have read your script and decided that you as a person are worth giving money to, and that’s when you’re a director.
The title, like the role, is something others have to grant you before you can quite believe it yourself. She still remembers the first email telling her a committee had decided to give her sixty thousand euros for a short, the moment it became real, even though she’d made four shorts before it. Getting to that point took a strange swerve: trapped in all-consuming production work she couldn’t afford to quit, she took a six-month soap-opera acting gig that paid a production assistant’s wage for ten days a month, and that pocket of time is what let her make a first short at all. The European funding she leaned on after is, in her words, a family you have to work your way into, with no second family if you don’t, and a market so small that a niche film seen by a tiny fraction of Belgium might reach a hundred people. You are, she says, both grateful for the system and wholly dependent on it. Even with the money secured, this film sat in a two-year queue, not for any flaw, the funders kept saying they loved it, but simply because there was only one door and she was fourth in line.
Doing It Anyway, Again and Again
The pattern repeats at every scale. After her debut Binti, a children’s film that premiered at Sundance and toured more than sixty-five festivals, she hesitated to adapt the novel that became this movie, afraid of being boxed in as a kids’-film director, then did it anyway. The book reached her almost by accident, handed over by an aunt while she was deep in writing something else, and reading it was a jolt of recognition; she saw her own restless adolescent interior in Bianca and wrote to the author, who said yes. The book, by Bart Moeyaert, was barely a hundred and twenty pages with an almost cinematic three-act spine, and her real task was to translate its narrator’s interior weather into scenes so the film wouldn’t collapse into voiceover. That meant committing to a frightening structure: a whole film unfolding across a single day, in fact only a few hours, almost entirely inside one house, much of it inside one girl’s mind.
You have to drag this mountain for years, keeping on believing in it and convincing people that it’s gonna be great.
She is candid that it could have come off cheesy or terrible. She did it anyway, because, as she says, you tell people your idea and they say “great idea,” and then nobody does anything, and you spend years convincing them it will be great when you yourself cannot know that it will.
The Film’s Subject Rhymes With Its Making
Here the movie and its maker fold into each other almost too neatly. Everyone’s Sorry Nowadays, a title lifted from the book’s portrait of a divorce drowned in hollow apologies, is about a girl insisting on her own existence before anyone has confirmed she’s allowed to. Bianca, unheard, has to do the exposing thing of stepping out of her parents’ distraction and toward herself. That is the same brave, uncertain act as a director persuading a funding table she’s worth the bet. Migom has said the film is about the overwhelming noise in your head when you feel unheard, and the way imagination becomes a lifeline. Her touchstone is Taika Waititi’s Boy, another coming-of-age story where a child’s interior fantasy is rendered visible against a realist backdrop.
She reaches too for Kusturica’s Arizona Dream and its magical realism, for the complex young-girl portraits of Céline Sciamma and Andrea Arnold (she singles out Arnold’s recent Bird), for Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and for the confined, people-only tension of 12 Angry Men. What unites them, for her, is the question she keeps chasing: how something can be utterly realistic and still let the inside of a mind become visible on screen. Her film sits comfortably beside two she doesn’t mention: Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, about a girl aching to be seen and to carve out a self, and Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides, with its dreamlike, house-bound interiority.
Constraint Is a Discipline, Not a Punishment
The title itself, kept from the book, names the film’s emotional key: a year of a marriage dissolving under a barrage of hollow apologies, the adult world gently punctured to reveal ordinary, imperfect people who say sorry far more than they mean it. Crucially, Migom separates limitation from suffering. The single day, the single house, the interior made visible, were not hardships to endure but a discipline that forces emotion to do the work spectacle usually does; she and her DP chose feeling over scenery on purpose. She even took a screenwriting workshop devoted entirely to working inside constraints, convinced the good stuff lives in the challenge. She loves actors, rereads Judith Weston’s Directing Actors before every shoot, and ran a notably gentle twenty-six-day production with a Belgian, Dutch and German crew gathered for weeks in and around the one house. Where her first feature had been rougher on its relationships, this one, she says, ran on so much care that even the hard days were fine, a beautiful summer where everyone was simply kind to each other. She explicitly rejects the old romance that you must suffer to make something good. What carries you instead is the half of her mentor’s wisdom people forget: trust the process. You feel the fear, you do it anyway, and then you stop trying to control the outcome and let the work lead. She holds even the premiere lightly, allowing that the press might see it and decide it’s nothing, because you never really know. The bravery was never fearlessness. It is dragging the mountain while still afraid, on nothing but hope, and a girl learning to be seen is simply that same act, rendered tender.
