About the Film
In her first feature-length film System Crasher, director Nora Fingscheidt examines the German society in astonishing depth, presenting a narrative rich with emotions and aches. As she depicts the hysterical state of her protagonist Benni, and the failing social system incapable of protecting her from herself and others, Fingscheidt brings to the forefront the mechanisms of a bureaucratic structure that have allowed for a little girl to be snatched from her mother's arms, failing to bring her back.
Resisting the challenges that she experiences, Benni spontaneously takes revenge on the system and "crashes" it the only way she knows how. Fingscheidt shows Benni’s constant displacement, disruption, and the hostility towards others who quite often represent the enemy, as the girl stubbornly opposes the complicated social management mechanisms that only aim to get rid of her by sending her somewhere outside of Germany, even if all the way to Kenya.
System Crasher is an attempt to understand and analyze the Western/capitalist social structure that has enormous material potential. It aims to highlight the misuse of the system in situations that require exceptional humane handling, which happens to strongly oppose a functional bureaucracy—the very bureaucracy that only wants to eliminate the “difficult” cases, such as Benni’s, administratively labelled as “system crashers.”
From a purely idle, functional perspective, the “system crasher” seems like a hopeless case. After marrying another man and having other children who became her first priority, Benni’s mother practically starts neglecting her and casting her aside. Upon being taken away from home, the little girl ends up bouncing from one foster home to another, where she is treated like a lab rat. To stand in the face of abuse and mistreatment, she takes her resistance as far as to refuse the forcible deportation to a distant African place.
In her film, Fingscheidt carefully examines the effects of emotional deprivation and neglect, while trusting the young actress Helena Zengel’s talents and ability to embody a rather provocative emotional and physical state on screen, gripping enough to keep the audience on the edge of their seat.
Kais Kasim
