Baki Davrak, left, portrays Nejat and Nursel Kose is Yeter, his father's prostitute lover, in Fatih Akin's The Edge of Heaven. (Corazn international/Mongrel Media)Anyone lucky enough to catch Fatih Akin’s breakout film, the Sid and Nancy-like love story Head-On (2006), could tell that the German-Turkish filmmaker was destined for a spot in the pantheon. Now, after shooting the excellent documentary Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul – a sorbet between courses – Akin has served up another outstanding fictional feature, The Edge of Heaven.

The film, which won a 2007 screenplay award in Cannes, had its North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival last year and is now being released in Canada. It places Akin alongside developing-world auteurs like Alfonso Cuaron, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and Fernando Meirelles – directors who shoot difficult material with a keen understanding of Hollywood movie mechanics: tight pacing, rich characterization, visual bombast. But Akin has avoided pandering to either the gallery or the art house. His films are like the astringent Turkish liquor raki – a hard taste to acquire at first, but then impossible to quit.

The Edge of Heaven tells several stories in three distinct sections: Hamburg-based Nejat (Baki Davrak) goes to Istanbul to search for the daughter of a prostitute (Nursel Kose) his father has murdered. The daughter, Ayten (a superb Nurgul Yesilcay), is on the run from the Turkish police due to her connections with an underground political movement. Ayten flees to Germany, where she excites the affections of a middle-class German university student named Lotte (Patrycia Ziolkowska), who follows her to Istanbul when she is deported. After tragedy strikes, Lotte’s mother (Hanna Schygulla, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s muse) also makes her way to Istanbul, and moves into her daughter’s old quarters, which she happens to rent from Nejat.

The visual device connecting these tales – and indeed Akin’s vision of Turkey and Germany – is the image of a coffin rolling into, or out of, the luggage hold of an airplane. It’s not a conciliatory image, especially considering the hand-wringing within Germany over its burgeoning Turkish population. There are 2.7 million people of Turkish descent living in Germany today – the massive front line of what right-wing commentators like Mark Steyn term “Eurabia,” a demographic surge of young, vital Muslims that is changing the tenor of the Christian Old World. The Ottoman Empire once clanged its scimitars against the gates of Vienna; Steyn and his ilk would argue that what Turkey could not achieve through war, it has won through immigration and birth rate. Akin, who was born in Germany to Turkish parents, isn’t interested in dulling the edges of this discourse. Rather, in The Edge of Heaven, he’s taken the knife to the whetstone.

Akin’s recent features (he’s only 34, but has been directing since he was 19) have two distinct but convergent cinematic precedents. The first is Doris Dorrie’s Happy Birthday, Turke!, a German production that did the art-house rounds in 1992. The film is a mordantly funny take on the private dick genre. The Philip Marlowe-like lead is a German citizen of Turkish origin who, in order to get to the bottom of a suitably noir-ish case, must negotiate a country that treats him like a third-class citizen. At the time, the film was a revelation in its portrayal of Germany’s seamy urban underbelly and the social exclusion practised against naturalized Turkish Germans.

Hanna Schygulla, left, stars as Susanne Staub and Patrycia Ziolkowska is her daughter, Lotte, in The Edge of Heaven. (Corazn international/Mongrel Media)At the same time, Akin's films also show him to be a sly and diligent student of Turkish art-house cinema. In particular, he appears to have been influenced by the legendary filmmaker/political prisoner Yilmaz Guney and his film Yol (The Road), which won the 1982 Palme d’Or at Cannes. Written while Guney was incarcerated, Yol tells the story of five prisoners who return to their villages after doing time in the slammer. The Edge of Heaven seems like a conscious effort to mimic that movie's epic sweep within a tight social context. Yol was a thundering condemnation of a Turkish military government more afraid of its own people than the enemies outside its borders. Akin’s films are no less socially strident in their criticism of Turkey, but keep one foot firmly in the Germany he knows so well.

Both Head-On and The Edge of Heaven are only superficially about the problems of living as a Muslim – or a Turk – in EU-era Germany. At heart, they’re about the problems of outsiders anywhere, the dangers of ghettoization, the lie of assimilation. The tyranny of ancient mores hangs low over Akin’s characters’ heads, like the sword of Damocles. What makes Head-On and The Edge of Heaven especially uncomfortable (a Turkish film professor I spoke to dismissed the films as “Orientalist”) is Akin’s refusal to subscribe to an easy cultural relativism. There is the western naiveté of Lotte, who in her callowness fails to grasp the danger of a Turkish street revolutionary who has seen and done things that a German undergrad can barely imagine. There is the brutality of Nejat’s father, with his small-minded Anatolian view of the world. There are lines between us, Akin is saying. There are differences, and they can be deadly. This is a bracing honesty that is all but inconceivable in Canadian cinema, where a firm multicultural mandate doesn’t allow for hard cultural truths.

The Edge of Heaven could be superficially compared to Babel, 21 Grams or, worse, Crash. But where Babel’s “we’re all connected, dude” cosmology becomes a parody of the cinematic triptych, The Edge of Heaven avoids such facile manipulation. Akin’s characters are not constructs, pawns to be moved about by a cinematic overlord to prove an arch metaphysical point. Their dislocation from place and from each other is as keen as a wound, exemplified by Nejat’s decision to purchase a German language bookstore in Istanbul: he sells his adopted culture to his home culture, the irresolvable conflict of the identity-less immigrant. Whereas Babel and Crash make the point that there are links between even the most disparate of souls, Akin reminds us that we can so easily become unmoored from those closest to us. Even the bonds that hold family together become shattered under the pressure of immigration.

Akin is by no means advocating a firm divide between Germans and Turks; he isn't interested in making explicit cultural judgments or offering pat answers. If there is an overriding theme in his films, it is the rather punk mistrust of tradition and mores, a sense that the past can only be so useful. His movies are abrasive because they don’t pull any punches for the sake of political correctness, but they’re effective because his characters are real, their pain rooted both in their cultural history and their own compromised natures. Love flits at the margins of the Akin universe, so close that his characters can reach out and touch it. They live on the edge of two distinct but now convergent cultures. It is their bane, but also their best hope at redemption.

The Edge of Heaven opens in Toronto on May 23.

Richard Poplak is a Toronto-based writer.

What did you think of this film? Leave a comment.