The Edge of Heaven

Fatih Akin's The Edge of Heaven (German: Auf der anderen Seite; Turkish: Yaşamın Kıyısında) won Best Screenplay at Cannes 2007 and went on to take Best Director at the European Film Awards the same year. It is the second part of Akin's loose Love, Death and the Devil trilogy, after Head-On (2004). The third part, The Devil, was never finished; Akin set it aside for other projects later in the decade.

The cast is as distinguished a group of Turkish and German performers as any single feature has brought together: Hanna Schygulla (Fassbinder's principal collaborator of the 1970s and one of the great faces of New German Cinema) alongside Tuncel Kurtiz, Baki Davrak, Patrycia Ziolkowska and Nurgül Yeşilçay. Schygulla's presence ties the film directly to the Turkish-German cinema Fassbinder had opened up with Ali: Fear Eats the Soul more than thirty years earlier. Rainer Klausmann, Akin's regular cinematographer, shot it.

It was filmed in Hamburg, Bremen and Istanbul over a thirty-five-day schedule. Akin, the son of Turkish immigrants to Hamburg, has worked in this territory for most of his career. The film takes on Kurdish political activism and the 2007 debates over Turkey's EU accession, and both the German and the Turkish press reviewed it as one of the most substantial films of the 2000s about the relationship between the two countries.