Taglines: Six people, six biographies, six lives.
The Edge of Heaven movie storyline. Six people, six biographies, six lives are fatefully intertwined, taking them on a perilous journey to their own true selves, without the two sets of protagonists ever meeting. It is only the death of one figure from each strand that brings their fates together, inescapably linked from the very beginning.
Nejat (Baki Davrak) seems disapproving about his widower father Ali’s (Tuncel Kurtiz) choice of prostitute Yeter (Nursel Köse) for a live-in girlfriend. But he grows fond of her when he discovers she sends money home to Turkey for her daughter’s university studies. Yeter’s sudden death distances father and son. Nejat travels to Istanbul to search for Yeter’s daughter Ayten (Nurgül Yesilçay).
The Edge of Heaven (German: Auf der anderen Seite, literally On the Other Side, Turkish: Yaşamın Kıyısında) is a 2007 Turkish-German drama written and directed by Fatih Akın. Linked through encounters, relationships and even death, the fragile lives of six people connect on emotional voyages toward forgiveness and reconciliation in Germany and Turkey.
The film won the Prix du scénario at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, was Germany’s entry in the category Best Foreign Language Film at the 2007 Oscars, but was not nominated. After making its worldwide debut at the Cannes Film Festival in France, the film was shown at several international film festivals. It was released in Germany on 27 September 2007. Filming took place in Bremen and Hamburg, Germany; at Taksim and Kadıköy in Istanbul; and on the Black Sea coast in Trabzon, Turkey.
About the Story
Yeter’s Death
Retired widower Ali Aksu (Tuncel Kurtiz), a Turkish immigrant living in the German city of Bremen, believes he has found a solution to his loneliness when he meets Yeter Öztürk (Nursel Köse). He offers her a monthly payment to stop working as a prostitute and move in with him. After receiving threats from two Turkish Muslims for the work she does, she decides to accept his offer. Ali’s son, Nejat Aksu (Baki Davrak), a professor of German literature, does not have time to respond to the prospect of living with a woman of “easy virtue” before Ali is stricken with a heart attack. He softens to her: he learns that she has told her 27-year-old daughter she is a shoe saleswoman, sending shoes to her in Turkey to support that story, and wishes her daughter could receive an education like his.
Back home from the hospital, Ali suspects Yeter and his son may have had a liaison. When his drunken demands of Yeter cause her to threaten to leave, he strikes her and she dies from the blow. Ali is sent to prison. Nejat travels to Istanbul to search for Yeter’s daughter, Ayten (Nurgül Yeşilçay), and assumes responsibility for her education. Unable to locate her through her family and not having any recent photos of her, he posts flyers with Yeter’s photo throughout the area, in hope that it will lead to the daughter. When he posts a flyer in a small German language bookstore that happens to be for sale, he finds himself charmed into buying it.
Lotte’s Death
A plainclothes officer loses his gun on the street during a riot. A hooded figure scoops it up and is pursued on foot by a battalion of uniformed officers, barely managing to hide the contraband on a random rooftop. This is Ayten, member of a Turkish anti-government resistance group.
When her cell is raided, she flees Turkey and takes up a new identity with political allies in Bremen, Germany. However, even there, she has a falling out when she is unable to pay them money she owes, and thus finds herself on the street with barely a euro to her name. Her mother’s number is lost, so she lives illegally and searches for her in local shoe shops.
Lotte, a university student, offers to help her with food, clothes, and a place to stay—a gesture which is not particularly welcomed by her mother, Susanne. Ayten and Lotte become lovers and Lotte decides to help Ayten search for her mother. The quest is cut short when a traffic stop exposes Ayten’s illegal status and she attempts a claim of political asylum. Despite Susanne’s financial support, Germany rules that Ayten has no legitimate fear of political persecution. She is deported and immediately imprisoned.
Lotte is devastated. She travels to Turkey to try to free Ayten, but quickly realizes how little hope there is, as she is facing 15 to 20 years in jail. Susanne pleads with her to think of her future and return home. When Lotte refuses, her mother denies her any further assistance. Lotte gravitates to Nejat’s bookstore and ends up renting a spare room from him.
Finally granted a prison visit with Ayten, Lotte complies with her imprisoned lover’s request and retrieves the handgun Ayten grabbed in the riot. But Lotte’s bag, with the gun inside, is snatched by a crew of boys that she then chases through their neighborhood. When finally she finds them in a vacant lot, one of them is inspecting the gun. She demands he return it, but he points it at her and fires, killing her instantly.
The Edge of Heaven (literally, On the Other Side)
Upon his release, Ali is deported to Turkey, returning to his property in Trabzon on the Black Sea coast. After her daughter’s death, Susanne goes to Istanbul to see where her daughter had been living the past few months. She meets Nejat and reads her daughter’s diary; she decides to take on her daughter’s mission of freeing Ayten from prison. Susanne’s visit to Ayten—an offer of forgiveness and support—leads the younger woman to exercise her right of repentance. As a result, she wins her freedom.
Susanne asks Nejat about the story behind a Bayram festival they hear about, learning that it commemorates Ibrahim’s sacrifice of his son Ishmael. She comments that there is the same story in the Bible, where Abraham is asked to sacrifice his son Isaac. Nejat reminisces about being scared by the story as a child and asking his father if he would sacrifice him if God told him to. When asked by Susanne what his father’s answer was, Nejat tells her that his father said “He would make God his enemy in order to protect me.” Nejat removes the flyer of Yeter from the shop’s noticeboard. He asks Susanne to look after his shop while he is gone, and drives to Trabzon, where his father is living.
Film Review for The Edge of Heaven
The point at which a good director crosses the career bridge to become a substantial international talent is vividly clear in “The Edge of Heaven,” an utterly assured, profoundly moving fifth feature by Fatih Akin. Superbly cast drama, in which the lives and emotional arcs of six people — four Turks and two Germans — criss-cross through love and tragedy takes the German-born Turkish writer-director’s ongoing interest in two seemingly divergent cultures to a humanist level that’s way beyond the grungy romanticism of his 2003 “Head-On” or the dreamy dramedy of “In July” (2000). Robust upscale biz looks a given.
Pic opens and closes in Turkey during a bayram, the word for a festival or holiday regardless of national or religious differences. First seen tooling around the Black Sea coast, Hamburg U. prof Nejat (Baki Davrak) is next seen arriving in nearby Bremen, where his father, sprightly septuagenarian Ali (Tuncel Kurtiz), still visits hookers as a cure for his loneliness.
Happening upon a no-nonsense Turkish prostie, Yeter (Nursel Kose), he proposes she moves in with him if he matches her hooking income. Under pressure to quit her job by two fundamentalist Turkish thugs, Yeter agrees. Turns out that, back in Turkey, Yeter has a 27-year-old daughter, Ayten (Nurgul Yesilcay), who thinks her mom works in a shoe shop. When Ali is hospitalized after a heart attack, Yeter forms a close relationship with the quiet Nejat, who accepts his father’s patriarchal lifestyle.
However, viewers have already been warned, in pic’s opening title (“Yeter’s Death”), that tragedy is waiting round the corner. Sure enough, Yeter is accidentally killed by Ali in an argument. As Ali is incarcerated in a German jail and Yeter’s body is shipped home, story shifts to Istanbul, where Nejat has bought a German-language backstreets bookshop. Between times, he’s searching for Ayten, to finance her education as a form of reparation.
As another audience warning (“Lotte’s Death”) appears on screen 40 minutes in, we meet Ayten, a political activist using the alias Gul Korkmaz who’s on the run from the authorities. Fleeing to Germany, she ends up penniless in Hamburg where she’s befriended by college student Lotte, daughter of comfy, middle-class Susanne (vet Hanna Schygulla). Lotte and Ayten become lovers, setting in motion a complex series of criss-crossing events that changes the lives of the survivors for ever as the story shifts back to Turkey.
Pic has a lean, almost procedural style, in which every scene and line of dialogue counts. Akin doesn’t try to hide the plot’s coincidences or Swiss watch-like precision, which is given human resonance by the flawless playing of the six leads. Only one scene, a political face-off by Ayten and Susanne, rings awkwardly.
By the time the second seg segues into the final one (film’s German title, “From the Other Side”), helmer’s long-burn approach packs a considerable emotional wallop in a quiet, inclusive way.
Veteran Turkish actor Kurtiz, who’s almost a national monument back home, dominates the early going with his frisky but deeply traditional Ali. Distaffers take over the running in the second half, with the utterly convincing Yesilcay (so good in the very different role of a quiet Moslem bride in recent Turkish pic “Adam & the Devil”) and Ziolkowska (from Akin’s “Solino”) as the lesbian lovers. Schygulla’s low-key perf grows more slowly, bringing a reconciliatory glow to the final reels.
Akin’s cultural ease with both countries shows in the shooting, spread between Bremen, Hamburg, Istanbul and Trabzon. Good-looking but never gratuitously glossy lensing by Rainer Klausmann (“Solino,” “Head-On,” “Downfall”) is an extra plus, as is the liberating score by Shantel (aka Stefan Hantel).
Continue Reading and View the Theatrical Trailer
The Edge of Heaven (2007)
Yaşamın Kıyısında
Directed by: Fatih Akın
Starring: Nurgül Yeşilçay, Baki Davrak, Tuncel Kurtiz, Hanna Schygulla, Patrycia Ziolkowska, Nursel Köse, Elçim Eroğlu, Nejat İşler, Asuman Altınay, Turgay Tünülkü, Erkan Can
Screenplay by: Fatih Akın
Production Design by: Sırma Bradley
Cinematography by: Rainer Klausmann
Costume Design by: Katrin Aschendorf
Music by: Shantel
Distributed by: Anka Film, Corazon International
Release Oate: September 27, 2007 (Germany), October 26, 2007 (Turkey)
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