Director Fatih Akin is showing his first film in the Cannes Official Competition, his second feature, The Edge of Heaven. This is not his first time to Cannes though as he served on the Jury two years ago as well as he presented Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul. After winning the Golden Bear at Berlin for Head-On in 2004, Fatih Akin suffered from expectation: “I felt pressured to come up with something better than Head-On. I wanted to do better artistically. I had to prove to myself that Head-On wasn’t the best I could do.” The outcome is The Edge of Heaven, a complex dramatic feature focusing on the importance of maintaining links to your country: the duality of cultures, death, forgiveness.

Ali decides to live with a Turkish prostitute named Yeter, despite the misgivings of his son Nejat, who is a German teacher. The young man soon develops an affection for Yeter, especially when he learns that she sends almost all her money to her daughter in Turkey so that she can complete her university studies. The accidental death of Yeter separates father and son even more.

“Filmmaking is a big part of my life, but it pales next to issues like birth, love and death. To really grow up, I felt I had to make three films. Call it a trilogy if you want to, but it’s basically three films that belong together because of their themes of love, death and evil. Head-On was about love. The Edge of Heaven is about death. Death in the sense of every death is a birth. Like both death and birth open doors to other dimensions. With The Edge of Heaven, I feel like I’m reaching some other level, but something is still missing that will be in the third film about evil. I just feel like I have to tell something to the end. These three films are kind of my homework, and then I can move on. Maybe move on to genre films, film noir, western, even horror.”