In one scene Benni runs away and hitch-hikes home to find her small siblings alone, unsupervised and watching horror films.

In the morning, while the parents are still sleeping, Benni goes into their bedroom and lifts the baby from his cot, takes him downstairs and carefully gives him breakfast.

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.

[3] Fingscheidt wrote the screenplay after five years of research[4] during which she lived or worked in residential groups, in a school for educational support, an emergency accommodation centre and a child psychiatry unit.

[3] 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.

[6] 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 jury, led by Feo Aladag, Sigrid Hoerner and Johannes Naber, praised the script as a “nightmarish, sensitive and meticulously researched commentary on [the German] pedagogic system and a moving, humanist plea for the ‘difficult’, the non-conformist, the presumed dysfunctional” [10] At its premiere, System Crasher received two stars out of a possible four in the international critical barometer Screen International, thereby achieving 11th place among the 16 Berlinale competition entries while Emin Alper's A Tale of Three Sisters and Nadav Lapid's Synonymes (3 stars each) headed the list.

[11] Oliver Kaever (Spiegel Online) described System Crasher in a brief review as “the opposite of a family-film” and praised the actors’ performances as “magnificent”, especially the female lead Helena Zengel.

According to Kaever, “System Crasher is a typical debut film: profuse in the choice of cinematic devices, dramaturgically meandering and too long, but its raw, unpolished energy enlivened the pretty dull opening phase of the Berlinale competition.” [12] Verena Lueken (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) likewise praised Zengel and described the film as “a surprise”: Fingscheidt had made not a social drama but “body cinema”, and also noted the effective soundtrack.

[13] In his review of the ending Berlinale, Wenke Husmann (Zeit Online) rated the film alongside Angela Schanelec's Ich war zuhause, aber… as “outstanding”.

[18] System Crasher won eight German Film Awards in 2020: Best Fiction Feature Film (Peter Hartwig, Jonas Weydemann, Jakob D. Weydemann), Best Director and Best Screenplay (Nora Fingscheidt), Best Actress (Helena Zengel), Best actor (Albrecht Schuch), Best Supporting Actress (Gabriela Maria Schmeide), Best Editing (Stephan Bechinger & Julia Kovalenko), Best Sound Design (Corinna Zink, Jonathan Schorr, Dominik Leube, Oscar Stiebitz, Gregor Bonse).