System Crasher

Nora Fingscheidt's System Crasher won the Silver Bear (Alfred Bauer Prize) at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2019, the festival's award for films that open new perspectives, and was Germany's official submission for the 92nd Academy Awards in the Best International Feature Film category. At the German Film Awards in 2019 it took eight Lolas, including Best Film and Best Director, the highest single-film tally of the year.

Helena Zengel was nine years old when the film was shot, and hers is one of the strongest child performances European cinema produced that decade. She went on to play opposite Tom Hanks in News of the World (2020), becoming the youngest German actress to receive a Golden Globe nomination, and she has kept working in major German and international productions since. Albrecht Schuch, Lisa Hagmeister and Gabriela Maria Schmeide lead a strong supporting cast.

Fingscheidt, who had previously made the documentary Without This World (2017), researched the German youth-welfare system at length before she wrote the script, working with social workers and former charges of several Wohngruppen (residential group homes). The German term Systemsprenger, which the film popularised, has since passed into general use in the domestic press, turning up whenever youth-services policy is debated. Her next project after it was the Netflix English-language drama The Unforgivable, with Sandra Bullock.