Another new release film by a woman is this one, which was at last year’s London Film Festival is this drama about a young girl (not yet 10 years old) who’s had a troubled upbringing and lashes out at everyone around her. It’s about the limits of empathy within bureaucratic systems, despite the best attempts of people within those systems.
This is a tough film in some ways—after all, its protagonist Benni (Bernadette, though she hates that name, played brilliantly by Helena Zengel) starts off being a deeply unpleasant young girl, lashing out at everyone around her and getting into fights easily. She’s first seen in a hospital, covered in bruises, being monitored by doctors. However, over the course of the film we come to, if not always tolerate her, at least understand something of how she has grown the way she has, and the filmmaking is engrossing, wrapping you up in her world and those of the (often patient, sometimes very much not) carers around her.
It becomes a film as much about how society is shaped in ways that don’t tolerate or accept non-conformist attitudes, about how difficult it is to find the resources to deal with those who won’t conform, and how bureaucratic systems just aren’t designed to keep up with real people and their problems at times. Of course, Benni is trouble but nobody really has the time or energy to look after her the way she wants and so she finds herself lashing out, in ways that would get her killed if she were older—and may yet get her killed, in the troublesome future which awaits her, a future that her most patient carer (Micha, played by Albrecht Schuch) lays out clearly for her. I suspect we all know kids a bit like Benni (albeit hopefully not quite as out of control); it’s a thin line between just being vocally unhappy sometimes, and being treated as problem that needs to be locked away, and though people try to help, the institutions that support them only seem to be geared towards incarceration, which leaves our “system crasher” with so few options despite her age not even being in double digits.
CREDITS
Director/Writer Nora Fingscheidt; Cinematographer Yunus Roy Imer; Starring Helena Zengel, Albrecht Schuch, Gabriela Maria Schmeide; Length 80 minutes. Seen at home (Curzon Home Cinema streaming), London, Thursday 30 April 2020. 
filmcentric 