Middle Eastern Studies Program, Film Screening & Discussion: "The Edge of Heaven"

There are six principal characters in “The Edge of Heaven”: two mothers, two daughters, a father and a son, all arranged in more or less symmetrical pairs. In the course of this extraordinary film by the German writer‐director Fatih Akin (which won the best screenplay award in Cannes in 2007) children are lost, lost parents are never found, and generational and geographical distances grow wider. Yet at the same time, as the lives of the characters cross and entwine, there is a sense of human connections becoming stronger and thicker, of a fragile moral order coalescing beneath the randomness and cruelty of modern life. And even as the movie bristles with violence —accidental and systematic, sexual and political —its tone is curiously gentle. — A. O. Scott, The New York Times