The Edge of Heaven

Nejat is a German literature professor at Hamburg University. Ali, his widowed father, who brought his family to Germany from Turkey, proposes to Yeter, his prostitute girlfriend, to abandon the profession and to move in with him. Yeter’s daughter is a political activist in Istanbul being pursued by the Turkish authorities. The film takes us between Istanbul and Hamburg, through the characters’ twists of life and death, until we reach the edge of heaven. As in all of Fatih Akin’s films, this, his fifth, deals with questions of identity, with the tension between family and national traditions and personal aspirations. In his measured cinematic style, Akin slowly builds up the cumulative emotional effect of the film.