Nejat: God wanted to put Ibrahim's faith to the test, so he ordered him to sacrifice his son. Ibrahim took his son, Ismail, to the sacrificial mount. But just as he was about to kill him, his knife went blunt. God was satisfied and sent a sheep in place of his son.
Susanne: We have the same story.
Nejat: I asked my dad if he would have sacrificed me too. I was afraid of this story as a child.
Susanne: And what did he say?
Nejat: That he would even make an enemy of God to protect me.
Nejat Aksu (Baki Davrak) is a Turkish immigrant in Germany who teaches German literature at a university and stays with his father, Ali (Tunsel Kurtiz). While Nejat is a shy guy, Ali frequents the streets for prostitutes and falls for a Turkish prostitute, Yeter (Nursel Kose). Ali offers Yeter to live with him forever and promises he'd pay her whatever she makes in her profession in exchange for her loyalty. While Nejat doesn't really approve of the arrangement, he adjusts after meeting Yeter and acquiesces for his father's wishes. After a certain turn of events in the first part (which is called "Yeter's Death"), Yeter dies in an accident.
The second part of the movie is named "Lotte's death". Nejat pays a visit to Istanbul to search for Yeter's daughter, Ayten (Nurgul Yesilcay), to whom Yeter always sent money for her tuition. As none of Yeter's family members know about Ayten's whereabouts, they do not even have a recent picture of her. Meanwhile we see Ayten as a member of an activist group that violently protests against the regime in Turkey. As she narrowly escapes getting caught by the police, she moves to Germany to search for her mother. While she visits a university campus to look for the cheapest food available, she happens to meet Lotte Staub (Patrycia Ziolkowska), who is sympathetic to her cause and befriends Ayten while feeling she finally has a "purpose in life". Again after a dramatic turn of events, we witness Lotte's death in the strangest of circumstances.
The third part of the movie is called "Edge of Heaven". When Lotte's mother Susanne (Hannah Schygulla) visits Turkey to collect her daughter's body, she meets Nejat, in whose house Lotte was a short-term tenant. As Nejat and Susanne go over the events that brought them together, they both find a strange kind of inner peace instead of the anger that is so common when someone close is taken away in very unusual circumstances. The movie also depicts the longing for a place that one can call "home" while each of the characters is dealing with whatever life throws at him/her. The acting by the whole cast seems very natural while the friendship between Lotte and Ayten really stands out. This is the second movie of Faith Akin (director of Head-On) that I've watched and this again deals with people with divided identities in both Germany and Turkey, similar to that in Head-On.
Rating: 7/10
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