| No Mercy, No Future | |
| Director: | Helma Sanders-Brahms |
| Producer: | Helma Sanders-Brahms |
| Music: | Manfred Opitz Harald Grosskopf |
| Cinematography: | Thomas Mauch |
| Editing: | Ursula West Hanni Lawerenz Bettina Böhler |
| Studio: | Helma Sanders-Brahms Filmproduktion GmbH |
| Distributor: | Basis-Film-Verleih GmbH |
| Runtime: | 108 minutes |
| Country: | West Germany |
| Language: | German |
No Mercy, No Future (German: '''Die Berührte''' , "The Touched") is a 1981 West German drama film directed by Helma Sanders-Brahms.
Veronika Christoph, the troubled daughter of uncaring bourgeois parents, has been institutionalized due to her schizophrenia. Without proper psychiatric treatment for her unearthly visions, she prowls the streets along the Berlin Wall at night in search of God, yet settles for the company of strange, exiled men.
The film was released on DVD by Facets Multi-Media in 2008.[1]
Thomas Elsaesser, author of European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood, wrote that No Mercy, No Future was a "relative" failure in the commercial and critical aspects compared to Germany, Pale Mother and that the situation "may have led Sanders-Brahms in the direction of the European art cinema."[2] London's Time Out has referred to the film's performances as faultless[3] and it was screened at the 1982 Berlin International Film Festival[4] and won the British Film Institute's Sutherland Trophy Award for 1981. Critic Michael Atkinson praised the film as a "classic, show-it-all acting coup that doesn’t wriggle free of your memory very easily."[5]