System Crasher is Nora Fingscheidt’s first feature film as director. Her attention was first drawn to the theme while filming the documentary Das Haus neben den Gleisen (2014) with Simone Gaul, which depicts life in a refuge for homeless women in Stuttgart. Among the women Fingsheidt met there was a fourteen-year-old girl, who as a system crasher was no longer accepted by any institution in the youth welfare service.

Fingscheidt wrote the screenplay after five years of research during which she lived or worked in residential groups, in a school for educational support, an emergency accommodation centre and a child psychiatry unit. She talked to staff at institutions and agencies as well as child and youth psychologists. Fingscheidt says she made System Crasher to raise awareness of severely traumatised children like Benni. It was a conscious decision to choose a nine-year-old girl with no background of migration and before the onset of puberty as the central figure, even though the majority of system crashers are boys. It was so that she “could keep away from clichés and rash categorisations” like the pubescent rebellion of a fourteen-year-old and similar imputations of gender or ethnicity. Making a documentary about system crashers was never an option for Fingscheidt: “I wanted to create a wild, high-energy audio-visual cinema experience that made no claim to be a record of reality. The reality is much worse.”

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