The Edge of Heaven

Fatih Akin's The Edge of Heaven (German: Auf der anderen Seite; Turkish: Yaşamın Kıyısında) won the Best Screenplay prize at Cannes 2007 and went on to take Best Director at the European Film Awards the same year. The film is the second part of Akin's loose Love, Death and the Devil trilogy, after Head-On (2004) and before the unfinished The Devil — Akin abandoned the third panel of the planned trilogy in favour of other projects later in the decade.

The cast brings together one of the most distinguished groups of Turkish-German performers ever assembled for a single feature: Hanna Schygulla — Fassbinder's primary 1970s collaborator and one of the major faces of New German Cinema — alongside Tuncel Kurtiz, Baki Davrak, Patrycia Ziolkowska and Nurgül Yeşilçay. Schygulla's appearance in particular gives the film a direct lineage to the foundational Turkish-German cinema tradition Fassbinder had begun with Ali: Fear Eats the Soul over thirty years earlier. Cinematography is by Rainer Klausmann, Akin's regular collaborator.

The production was shot across Hamburg, Bremen and Istanbul over a thirty-five-day schedule; Akin himself is the son of Turkish immigrants to Hamburg and has worked principally in this territory throughout his career. The film engages directly with themes of Kurdish political activism and the 2007 Turkey EU accession debates, and was widely reviewed in both German and Turkish press as one of the most substantial cinematic engagements with the bilateral relationship in the 2000s.