One person who did not celebrate the reunification of Germany was the West German writer Gisela Elsner. Elsner, a literary star in the 1960's later became a deeply troubled and selfish woman. A practicing bourgeoise, she mocked the acquisitiveness of the West in her books which celebrated life under socialism. In the East she was required reading, yet resented there. No Place to Go is a wrenching portrait of an extraordinary woman by writer-director Oskar Roehler who is also the son she had virtually deserted. Finding no surcease from herself in the "New" Germany, Elsner committed suicide. Imagining both the pathetic hopes and ferocious disappointments of his mother's last days, Roehler has fashioned a transfixing memorial to an infuriating, larger-than-life but not unsympathetic woman known in this film as Hanna Flanders and played with impressive intensity by Hannelore Elsner.

West Germany, 1999. 103 min.