CANNES: Good direction, superlative performances by the actors, and a storyline that keeps you emotionally engrossed are the hallmarks of Fatih Akin's The Edge of Heaven, which screened in the competition section of the Cannes Film Festival. The film travels over two countries - Turkey and Germany - and three languages - Turkish, English and German, and Akin deserves a pat on the back for making things work in a storyline that has several plot points because of the number of characters involved and the conflicts and the resolutions that have to be set into place.

First, there is Ali Aksu (Tuncel Kuritz), a widower Turkish immigrant living in Bremen, Germany with his professor of German son Nejat (Baki Davrak), who decides to visit a sex worker Yeter (Nurset Kose). He then proposes that she come and live with him, and she agrees to the proposal. The son finds the proposal extremely suspect but grows to respect Yeter as he gets to know her.

Ali suspects that Yeter has a sexual liasion with his son and in a fit of drunken rage he slaps her resulting in her accidental death. Ali is sent to prison, Yeter's body is flown to Turkey in a coffin. Nejat gets estranged from his father and goes to Turkey to help find the dead sex worker's long lost daughter Ayten (Nurgul Yesilcay) to provide for her education, which was her mother's wish. He falls in love with Turkey, buys a bookshop and starts his search for Ayten.

Ayten who has grown up is introduced as being a part of a band of terrorists who are fighting the acting government's policies (Akin does not explain which ones and why). During a protest, she is chased by the police and she manages to escape hiding a gun which she had under a tank on the terrace of an apartment block she flees to. She then migrates to Germany under a disguised name and lands up in Bremen, and comes in contact with her terrorist colleagues there and also starts looking for her mother, who she thinks works in the shoe trade. She takes a loan from the terrorist organisation to search for her mother but it is a fruitless search as her mother used to work in the sex trade, not the shoe trade.

She cannot repay the money and hence she gets thrown out and she roams about the Bremen University in the search of cheap food and encounters a young German girl Lotte (Patrycia Ziolkowska) who helps her out, takes her home and develops a lesbian relationship with her which her mother Susan (Hannah Schygulla) disapproves of. However, the two go about it despite her mother's disapproval.

Ayten gets deported to Turkey when she runs from Lotte's car when they are pulled over by the police for not wearing her seat belt.. But not before Susan and Lotte fight the legal system and try to get her asylum in Germany. The government however refuses as Turkey is about to join the European Union. Ayten is flown back to Turkey and lands up in prison.

Lotte gives up everything and flies to Turkey to try and help her lover. She searches high and low for her and is unsuccessful. Her mother tells her to return which she refuses to do and Susan then tells her she must fend for herself. She then encounters Nejat in the bookshop and he offers her boarding and lodging. She manages to get a meeting with Ayten in prison. When they meet, she volunteers to help Aytern in every way. Ayten tells Lotte to recover the gun from the building terrace, which she does. But her purse containing the gun is snatched from her by street urchins who then accidentally shoot her dead.

Now it is Lotte's body which returns to Germany in a coffin. And Susan comes to Turkey to experience what drove her daughter to do what she did. She meets up with Nejat as her daughter was his tenant and lives in the room Lotte stayed. She also reaches out to Ayten and offers to help her out in every way. Ayten denounces her political affiliation and gets freedom - in all probability to be with Susan in Germany. Nejat in the meanwhile decides to mend bridges with his father and the film closes with him on the beach waiting for Ali to return from his fishing expedition.

The film has shades of Innaritu (a la Babel) in terms of the use of flashbacks to connect the various story tracks, and also the coincidences that hold the story together. Clearly a film which has the potential to find viewers with mainstream audiences as well as festival regulars.