NO PLACE TO GO

The autumn of 1989 in Europe. The Berlin Wall crumbles in a bloodless revolution that was indeed televised, and the East and West Germans cheered on the impending Reunification. All except for author Hanna Flanders, watching horrified from her Munich apartment, a bottle of arsenic in her hands. Once she was the dark lady of German literature, a libertine anti-capitalist rebel and staunch supporter of GDR socialism as the ideal system; now Hanna Flanders is as much of a relic as the LEninism to which she clings. Nobody wants to publish her bitter manuscripts anymore. She undertakes a disastrous move to Berlin, hoping to reaatach with a former lover/editor, near to her estranged ex-junkie son. But as she wanders the streets, chain-smoking in her pretentiously arty couture, a Cleopatra wig framing her pale, alcohol-ravaged face, running low on money, health and time, Hanna Flanders herself learns what it is to be discarded on the scrap-heap of history. Hanna Flanders is, in fact, a diguised version of real-life German writer Gisela Elsner – director Oskar R?hler's mother, whose star fell shortly after the Wall did, much the way Hanna Flanders does. Here, in Gisela's favorite colors, black and white, the son chronicles and memorializes a lost intellectual whose spark blazes even in descent. (In German with English subtitles)