The Edge of Heaven: your purchase benefits LCC programmingFrom the exceptionally talented Turkish-German writer/director of “In July,” “Head On” and “Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul” comes one of our favorite movies of the year—a drama with six characters that bears repeat viewings. As Boston Globe critic Wesley Morris put it, “In just a couple of movies, 34-year-old Fatih Akin has become the most exciting of Europe's young directors, reinvigorating the melodrama with a furious kind of identity politics. Like ‘Head-On,’ his 2004 wrecking-ball romance, Akin's new ‘The Edge of Heaven’ is perched along the fault line of the current Turkish-German situation. And the more determined he is here to examine the chasm between the two sides, the wider and deeper the movie gets.

“Germany at the moment is home to about 2.7 million people of Turkish citizenship or heritage, making Turks the nation's largest and most fraught minority. Turkey, meanwhile, is exasperatingly close to European Union membership and yet at odds with itself over how European, Muslim, and Middle Eastern it is and wants to be.”

Indeed, crossing political and generational boundaries, "The Edge of Heaven" elaborates the lives of mothers and fathers, sons and daughters who cross back and forth through the two countries, trying to find themselves and one another, yet are mostly unable to connect. Starring bilingual actors Nurgül Yesilçay, Baki Davrak, and Tuncel Kurtiz, the film revolves around Nejat, who initially disapproves of his widower father Ali`s choice of prostitute Yeter for a live-in girlfriend. But the young professor warms to her when he learns that most of her hard-earned money is sent home to Turkey for her daughter’s university studies.

After Yeter`s accidental death, Nejat travels to Istanbul to search for Yeter`s daughter Ayten. Political activist Ayten has fled the Turkish police and is already in Germany. She is befriended by a young woman, Lotte, who invites rebellious Ayten to stay in her home, much to the displeasure of her conservative mother, Susanne. When Ayten is arrested and her asylum plea denied, she is deported and imprisoned in Turkey. Passionate Lotte abandons everything to help Ayten. A tragic event brings Susanne to Istanbul to help fulfill her daughter`s mission.

As the San Francisco Chronicle’s Mick LaSalle notes, “The experience of seeing ‘The Edge of Heaven’ is cumulative, sober and profound. By the time it's over, audiences will feel as if they've seen whole other worlds, sides of worlds and worlds within worlds. They will feel as if they've come to know a handful of characters deeply and intimately, because they will have seen them in moments of emotional extremity.”

This film reminds us why we go to the movies in the first place—not necessarily to be entertained, but to lose ourselves in a story, in a dream. Fatih Akin, as LaSalle points out, “is a poet of the everyday.”