Directed by:
Nora FingscheidtScreenplay:
Nora FingscheidtCinematography:
Yunus Roy ImerComposer:
John GürtlerCast:
Helena Zengel, Albrecht Schuch, Lisa Hagmeister, Gabriela Maria Schmeide, Melanie Straub, Victoria Trauttmansdorff, Maryam Zaree, Tedros Teclebrhan (more)VOD (1)
Plots(1)
She is small, but dangerous. Wherever Benni ends up, she is immediately expelled. The wild 9-year- old girl has already become what child protection services call a “system crasher”. And she is certainly not looking to change her ways. Because Benni has one single goal: to be back at home with her mommy! But Bianca is scared of her own daughter. Mrs. Bafane? from child protection services is trying her best to find a permanent placement for Benni. She hires the anger management trainer Micha as Benni’s school escort and suddenly there is a seed of hope. Will Micha be able to succeed where all others despaired? (B-Plan Distribution)
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Reviews (7)
I haven't seen such an uncompromising and rawly realistic social drama in a long time. I still feel sick to my stomach from the crazy cocktail of conflicting emotions that German director Nora Fingscheidt mixed together in her feature debut. When parents don't give their children enough love and care, they often grow up to be unmanageable brats. The aggressive and traumatized girl Benni, played by Helena Zengel in an incredibly convincing performance, is a typical example of an unloved child, whose every effort to be truly loved ends in abject failure... It seems to me that we live in a rather strange and overly technologized world, which is no longer a pleasant place for emotional individuals. This is also why I am very concerned that there are more uncared for kids running around, lost in the system, than we can even imagine. (95%)
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Child's Play: Don't touch my face! I assume that the cyclical nature of the plot was meant to emphasize the hopelessness of the situation and exhaust the viewer, who encounters it for only two hours and from a detached perspective. The result is a “non-family film,” followed by admiration for those who try to chew through a morsel that was too large for its creator and then still have to somehow swallow it.
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A dense drama about a ten-year-old girl with aggressive outbursts of rage that her mother is afraid of, whilst social facilities pass her back and forth to each other like a hot potato. This is by far this year’s film with the most screaming, which also serves as a feature-length advertisement for contraception. The film boasts great actors and an empathetic insight into the worries of social workers, whose sense of hopelessness, threat and constant terror is successfully transmitted to the audience. The film excels in building fears of another fit by the little girl and offers a number of surprisingly chilling scenes, but in its second half goes in circles for too long and is slightly clueless about how to end the suffering somewhat satisfactorily.
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This is a truly uncompromising and unpleasantly noisy drama about a child who, due to past traumas becomes a danger to herself and the people around her, but how can the system help her? We are then witnesses to a merry-go-round of different fostering arrangements, all of which fail, and therefore a proper solution is never in sight. The plot of the two-hour-long movie, however, is a bit stuck in an endless impasse, as we are constantly presented with a few minutes of hope and then disappointment, over and over again. Nora Fingscheidt wanted to instill some frustration in the audience regarding the hopelessness of the situation, however, for me, something like that would be enough with a 90-minute movie. Here, after the first hour, I thought that it might somehow end slowly. Not to mention that we never find out the fundamentally important issue of quite what trauma little Benni had experienced in the past, and especially, who caused it (or what role her mother, who is a key figure in the movie, played in it). I will now add a small sarcastic remark at the end - that it borders on fantasy, that a nine-year-old girl could always be able to run faster than any of the adults chasing her. However, I would still recommend this movie, as I think it is helpful to see it. [KVIFF 2019]
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I had no idea that an uncontrollable child is referred to as a "system crasher" in Germany. But I was fascinated by how vibrantly, humanly, and rawly the director brought this concept to life in her debut film. I was captivated and enjoyed every minute of it. This film made me ponder whether things are any different in my country, or if we also face endless bureaucracy and a lack of more humane approaches within the confines of the rules. I suspect it's not much different here. The real question is, how many system crashers does our own society produce today?
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