The Edge of Heaven

The Edge of Heaven follows six people whose lives become entangled across Germany and Turkey. Ali, a widowed Turkish pensioner living in Bremen, invites Yeter, a sex worker he has been seeing regularly, to move in with him. His son Nejat, a professor of German literature in Hamburg, is unsettled by the arrangement until he learns that Yeter sends most of her earnings to Turkey to fund her daughter's university studies. A sudden death separates father and son, and Nejat travels to Istanbul to look for Yeter's daughter Ayten. Ayten, meanwhile, is a political activist who has fled Turkey for Germany, where she is taken in by Lotte, a German student drawn to her. When Ayten is detained and sent back to Turkey, Lotte sets off after her. Susanne, Lotte's mother, becomes part of the story as well, and the characters' paths continue to cross on both sides of the border.

Fatih Akin directed and wrote the film, which he also produced with Klaus Maeck and Andreas Thiel. It followed his features Solino and Head-On and the documentary Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul, and it sits between those films and his later work such as Soul Kitchen and In the Fade. The cast includes Nurgül Yeşilçay, Baki Davrak, Patrycia Ziolkowska, Tuncel Kurtiz, Nursel Köse and Hanna Schygulla, among 44 credited performers. Made for about 4 million dollars, it took roughly 18 million worldwide, a strong return. It holds a 7.2 rating on TMDB from over 360 votes, while critics rated it 7.8 from 80 reviews, placing it somewhat higher than general audiences did.