It’s not often the majority of a Hong Kong cinema’s audience stay seated as a film’s end credits roll but that really was the case at the screening of The Edge of Heaven I attended. And while it’s true enough that this probably was in part because we were waiting – in vain, as it turned out – to see one final scene that would bring this thoroughly absorbing drama to a conventional close, I was also reluctant to say goodbye to movie characters who had come across as so real and, more often than not, likeable.

A killer (albeit accidental), a prostitute and a jailbird join others, including a university professor who decides to become a bookshop owner, as the main characters – four of them Turks, two German – of this involving fifth feature from gifted German-born Turkish writer-director Fatih Akin. But what matters more in the Cannes Best Screenplay winner is that this sextet make up three parents and their offspring whose lives end up intersecting as they move from one country to another (in death, if not in life).

In Germany, the ethnic Turkish Nejat (Baki Davrak) is the bookish son of Ali (Tuncel Kurtiz), a pensioner and widower who lives alone but still manages to be sexually active. One evening at dinner, his father introduces him to a fellow Turk, Yeter (Nursel Köse). A “lady of easy virtue”, she has been made a business proposition by her client, Ali: in return for his matching her income, she will move in and sleep only with him. Under pressure from two thuggish religious fundamentalists who threaten violence if she doesn’t ‘repent’, Yeter agrees to do so. Little does she know, however, that she may have ended up jumping out of the frying pan into the fire...

In a second storyline, Yeter’s daughter, Ayten (Nurgül Yesilçay) – who, incidentally, mistakenly thinks that her mother works in a shoe shop – really is in trouble. Wanted by the Turkish police after she comes into possession of one of their guns, she flees to Germany where her search for her mother proves to be in vain. Left penniless after supposed comrades in exile prove less supportive than she had hoped, she fortuitously befriends an English-speaking German university student named Charlotte (Patrycia Ziolkowska) who, upon learning of her circumstances, generously offers Ayten a room in her mother’s (Hanna Schygulla) house and, then, also herself.

At some point in the film, all six of its main characters end up in Turkey. While the majority of them make the move in circumstances that are not particularly ideal, at the movie’s end the feeling is that, more often than not, the relocation is one that will not be regretted. And at the risk of appearing to leap from one subject to another, that too may well be the case with this dramatic offering which seriously deserves to make the cross over from acclaimed European art-house film to international box office hit.

Yvonne Teh