Fatih Akin’s trilogy “Love, death and the devil” kicked off in 2003 with the multi award-winning melodrama HEAD-ON, a tale of excessive and destructive passion. He now resumes the series with a six-character rondo of a strikingly different tone: it moves at a gentle pace, adopts a balladic narrative and explores deep philosophical questions. It is the story of six people whose lives intertwine in Hamburg and Istanbul and who mature and transform after encountering death. Akin views it as his “most spiritual film”.

Regardless of whether you view him as a “Hamburg resident of Turkish origin” or a “Turkish filmmaker born in Germany”, Fatih Akin’s last two films have proved that he is a director of international calibre. “After HEAD-ON he was adopted by cinophiles the world over”, wrote the film critic from French newspaper Libération. The Cannes reporter for American magazine Variety summed up THE EDGE OF HEAVEN as follows: “With this film Akin has reached the point at which a good director crosses the career bridge to become a substantial international talent”.
High praise indeed for a filmmaker who was born and bred in Hamburg in a Turkish immigrant family, who unvaryingly depicts outsiders in his films whose lives oscillate between Germany and Turkey in an endeavour to integrate into his work the full scope of cultural contrasts which have shaped his existence: divergences between urban western and traditional Turkish culture, between high culture and pop, between political engagement and a spiritual quest for meaning, between generations and male and female role models.
Akin is a self-confessed fan of pop icon Prince, likes to spin Balkan pop behind the decks and is also a lover of classical music. His passionate and deferential documentary exploring Istanbul’s lively music scene, CROSSING THE BRIDGE (2002), in which he depicted a tremendously multi-faceted musical panorama encompassing everything from experimental jazz and pop to traditional folk music, reflects his incredibly varied tastes. What sets Akin apart is the way he views the search for identity not as a process of exclusion but rather as an enquiring, candid and passionate quest to establish if, and how, contrasting spheres of life can interact with one another. It is no coincidence, then, that the progression of his various works is also a play of contrasts.
THE EDGE OF HEAVEN is an astonishingly new sound for Akin. HEAD-ON was punk rock; Akin’s second offering is a ballad. HEAD-ON’s male hero was wild, anarchic and self-destructive; this hero is the very opposite: gentle, level-headed, thoughtful and intellectual. His name is Nejat (Baki Davrak), he is an “androgynous character” (Akin) and the link holding together the tangled threads of six destinies which intertwine, influence and sometimes merely brush past each other. Nejat is a German professor at Hamburg University. He explains to his students why Goethe took a stand against revolutions, citing the quote: “Has anyone ever desired to see a rose bloom in the depths of winter? Only a fool longs for this unseasonal rapture!” Nejat cares for his elderly father, Ali Asku (Tuncel Kurtiz), who has a heart condition. Ali, a widower and former Bremen taxi driver, had to raise his son on his own and, now that he has reached old age, once again longs to be in the bosom of a family of sorts. With this goal in mind he goes to Bremen’s red light district, finds himself a Turkish prostitute, Yeter Ötztürk (Nursel Köse), and takes her home with him. However, Yeter is not always as obedient as he would like. One day his bullying, patriarchal nature erupts in a fit of rage and he lashes out at Yeter, who falls and dies.
Ali is arrested and deported to Turkey. Nejat severs contact with his father and, having learned that Yeter used the money she earned as a prostitute to support her daughter Ayten (Nurgül Yeşilçay) in Istanbul, he takes over a German bookshop there and goes in search of her. However Ayten, a militant political activist on the run from the Turkish police, is travelling in the opposite direction and enters Germany illegally.
The story jumps from one character to another, and repeatedly leaps back in time. This produces a multi-perspective rondel-like narrative structure reminiscent of Kurosawa’s RASHOMON, which now follows Ayten’s destiny: an encounter with a young, politically active German student, Lotte Staub (Patrycia Ziolkowska), which results in a love story and a fierce dispute with Lotte’s jealous, overprotective mother (Hanna Schygulla), imprisonment by the German asylum authorities and deportation to a Turkish women’s prison. The tale culminates in Istanbul where Lotte is shot in a tragic accident. Her grieving mother takes up her daughter’s cause and meets Nejat.
The film covers major issues, such as immigration and asylum rights, prostitution and family reconstruction, death and metamorphosis. Ultimately, however, its strength stems from the power of its characterization. The protagonists are drawn with wonderful precision: the father’s gnarled form, the activist daughter’s militant spirit, the German professor’s contemplative calm. A particularly beautifully crafted sequence is the kitchen scene where Hanna Schygulla decorates a cake with cherries. The mother, who is jealous of Ayten because of the rift she has created with her daughter, is forced to shake herself out of her lethargic state as she attempts to lecture the young Turkish girl.
“The Edge of Heaven” is an expression of Akin’s gentle, meditative, feminine side. It is no coincidence that the crucial scenes take place in the kitchen (an earlier version was entitled “Soul Kitchen”) and that both mother figures play central roles. The Turkish mother is depicted as a whore-cum-saint and her German counterpart as a clucking maternal hen, who manages to break free from the confines of her taciturn nature. Audiences will doubtless be eager to see how Akin will bring the “Love, Death and the Devil” trilogy to a close and portray the devil on the silver screen.
Fatih Akin’s Biography Fatih Akin was born in 1973 into a family of Turkish immigrants in the Hamburg Altona district. His father came to Germany in 1965 and worked in a carpet-cleaning company; his mother was a primary school teacher. Akin’s 2001 documentary WIR HABEN VERGESSEN ZURÜCKZUKEHREN is a biographical account of his family background. As a schoolboy he was involved in a theatre group, wrote short stories and screenplays and took his first steps into the film world with a Super 8 camera. After completing his A-levels, he took visual communication studies at the Hamburg Academy of Fine Arts between 1994 and 2000. In 1998 he released his debut feature film KURZ UND SCHMERZLOS and in 2003 founded the film production company Corazón International with Andreas Thiel and Klaus Maeck. In 2004 his fourth feature film HEAD-ON clinched awards at three festivals – the Golden Bear at Berlin International Film Festival, the Film Award in Gold at the German Film Awards and various prizes at the European Film Awards – signalling his breakthrough onto the international stage. In 2005 Akin was a member of the jury at Cannes Film Festival, where THE EDGE OF HEAVEN won Best Screenplay in 2007.

Production Country

Germany (DE), Italy (IT), Turkey (TR)

Production Period

2006/2007

Production Year

2007

color

color

Aspect Ratio

1:1,85

Duration

Feature-Length Film (61+ Min.)

Type

Feature Film

Genre

Drama

Topic

Relationship / Family, Friendship, Europe, Migration / Flight / Exile

Available Media

DVD, 35mm

Original Version

German (de), Turkish (tr), English (en)

DVD

Subtitles

German (de), Estonian (et), Romanian (ro), Turkish (tr), English (en), Irish, Slovenian (sl), Russian (ru), French (fr), Latvian (lv), Slovak (sk), Portuguese (Brazil), Spanish (es), Lithuanian (lt), Finnish (fi), Indonesisch (id), Portuguese (Brazil) (pt), Maltese, Swedish (sv), Arabic (ar), Italian (it), Hungarian (hu), Greek (el), Chinese (zh), Czech (cs), Dutch (nl), Danish (da), Polish (pl), Bulgarian (bg), Japanese (ja)

35mm

Subtitles

Spanish (es), French (fr), English (en)

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