The Edge of Heaven begins in a service station, a blast of primary colours and raucous mid-day light set against the tinny transistor rhythms of a music at once familiar and exotic, generic (to the Western ear) and redolent of the Eastern Mediterranean.  You might forgive yourself for thinking you know where you are and where you will be taken, but it is our good fortune (we viewers, he film-maker) that Fatih Akin has spent three decades living the complexities of the second-generation migrant experience with the kind of curiosity and empathy which relishes in the vulnerable and the unexpected as much as the robust and the inevitable, and is alive to what life as we live it does so bafflingly well: that is collide and diverge in the least expected places.  

So we begin with Nejat (Baki Davrak), the serious-minded young professor, and the story that has taken him back to the land of his forefathers on a journey not of nostalgia, but of atonement, to discover the daughter of Yeter (Nursel Köse), the middle-aged prostitute accidentally killed by his Turkish father back home in Germany.  Nejat (like Akin, who has said, in his rather breathless way, that "education is the only thing that can save the world") believes in education, and he has come to seek out Yeter's daughter Ayten (Nurgül Yesilçay) in an attempt to fulfil her dearest wish by taking her back to Germany and paying for her education.  But Ayten is nowhere to be found, so Nejat is left to make his home in Istanbul, buying a bookshop from a homesick German intellectual, and we return to Northern Germany to discover that Ayten, a feisty and independent-minded political dissident has fled there after nearly being arrested with her comrades in a raid in Istanbul.  She has travelled on false documents and is living penniless, looking for her mother who she believes works in a shoe shop.  As the trail goes cold and increasingly hopeless, she is befriended by German student Lotte (Patrycia Ziolkowska), who falls in love with her and takes her home to live with her mother whilst Ayten applies unsuccessfully for political asylum.  When Ayten is deported and imprisoned, Lotte decides to go after her, triggering a tragedy which sees her mother, Susanne (Hanna Schygulla) following in her footsteps and ultimately coming to terms with the loss of her daughter through the love of Ayten, just as in the closing scenes of the film, Nejat is beginning to come to terms with the actions of his father. 

This is a film of balanced asymmetries, the kind of coincidences that those who seek in fiction plausibilities and meanings not to be found in life may baulk at, but which on reflection we know are part of the tissue of reality.  It is about setting out to answer one question and finding the answer to a different one, and about confronting what it really means to care, in extremis, for someone else.  How do you get over your father doing the unforgivable? Do you try to make up for it by changing your own life?  This is what Nejat does, and we can ask ourselves why he should feel the need to do so… Yet Akin knows that our lives are never so materially determined by the actions of those closest to us than when we try to deny those actions.  He gives each character the dignity of all their dimensions, so Lotte's mother is not the prim and conservative Frau, shocked by her daughter's unexpected turn, but the former Sixties free spirit, confronted by what it is to pass on that freedom and passion, when all a mother's instincts battle to treasure and protect… 

It is also about how the personal changes the politics of a country, as new biographies weave themselves into the fabric of a nation: it is important to Akin to portray in Nejat a German professor of Turkish origin; a female doctor, also of Turkish extraction, working at a hospital in Bremen (as if to underline the point, pregnant with a third generation); alongside the prostitute, the asylum-seeker and the retired and ill-educated father.  He confronts and celebrates the reality of multiculturalism in Germany, showing us it both embodied and embedded. 

It is unabashedly a political film, subjective and possibly even wrong in places, but with a direct line to deeper insights and catharses.