'Heaven,' an Ascendant Moment for German Director Fatih Akin

If you stay in this business long enough, eventually you get to discover someone.

That's the feeling I had last year at the Toronto International Film Festival, watching "The Edge of Heaven," by the German filmmaker Fatih Akin. When I say "discover," I mean it only in the most personal sense: Akin, whose first American-released film came out in 2001, has been on the radar of countless critics and discerning viewers for years.

So I'm surely not alone when I recall watching "The Edge of Heaven" as a singularly triumphant experience, wherein a filmmaker I and several colleagues once called promising came into his own as a mature, fully realized artist.

"The Edge of Heaven" is a sprawling, multi-character tale that spans continents and addresses such of-the-moment issues as immigration, cultural tradition, identity and global politics. If that sounds familiar, it may be because "The Edge of Heaven" is the film that "Babel" wanted so desperately to be -- rich, textured, urgent, profound.

Most important to Akin's fans, "The Edge of Heaven," which screens at Filmfest DC on May 2 and opens in Washington theaters on June 20, marks a watershed in the career of a young director who with every film seems to work at a progressively higher level of fluency and assurance. ("The Edge of Heaven" is Akin's fifth fiction film, the third to be released in the United States.)

The first Akin film I reviewed was "In July," a winsome, somewhat contrived romantic comedy starring Moritz Bleibtreu and Christiane Paul. Bleibtreu played a shy teacher who embarks on a transcontinental sojourn for a Turkish woman he's convinced is the love of his life, and Paul played a free-spirited girl who goes along for the ride. A lighthearted road picture-cum-romance, "In July" was a classic "promising debut." (Akin, who studied visual communications at Hamburg's College of Fine Arts, had already made one feature in Germany.)

Carefully composed and photographed and crisply paced, it was the work of someone who knew how to tell a story cinematically. What's more, Akin had a clear knack for casting: With its breathtakingly improbable coincidences and unapologetic romanticism, "In July" might have been painfully twee; what saved it were the performances Bleibtreu and Paul, who stood out as actors to watch (Bleibtreu went on to work with such directors as Paul Schrader and Steven Spielberg). "In July" also anticipated what would become Akin's cardinal themes: tensions between East and West, traditionalism and modernity, cultural insularity and cosmopolitanism.

The 34-year-old son of Turkish immigrants in Hamburg attained newfound seriousness in 2004's "Head-On," which again focused on the Turkish immigrant experience in Germany, but with newfound seriousness. In this searing drama, lead players Birol Unel and Sibel Kekilli deliver tough, uncompromising performances as an alcoholic head banger and the daughter of an oppressively traditional Turkish family, respectively. Like its far sunnier predecessor, "Head-On" was preoccupied with love, fate and crossing borders but, as its title suggests, in a far more confrontational way.

Telling a far-ranging story of characters who undergo radical personal and geographic transformations, Akin once again showed a penchant for travel (as with "In July," the protagonists start out in Germany and wind up in Turkey) as well as astute casting: Unel, a frequent Akin repertory player, underwent a particularly startling physical transformation as a man who cleans up his act in the name of passion. If "Head-On" represented an encouraging next step for Akin, "The Edge of Heaven," which made its debut at Cannes last year, is his great leap forward. Once again, Akin plunges viewers into the world of Turkish immigrants in Germany, but he tells a far more complex story with almost exponentially more characters than he's focused on before. There's the young college professor of Turkish descent, his patriarchal father, the prostitute the latter marries, the prostitute's daughter that the college professor decides to find in Istanbul, the German college student the prostitute's daughter falls in love with -- and we haven't even gotten to Hanna Schygulla yet.

Beautifully acted by an ensemble of emerging and veteran German and Turkish actors, "The Edge of Heaven" is a vivid, tightly woven roundelay of relationships and tensions, all steeped in contemporary global politics. What's more, it exhibits a quality all too rare in Akin's young contemporaries in Hollywood: ambition backed up by artistic rigor and true talent.

It's worth noting that a Fatih Akin film has appeared in American theaters between "Head-On" and "The Edge of Heaven." In 2005 he made "Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul," an exuberant documentary about contemporary Turkish music that spanned urban hip-hop and Romany folk songs, with nods to such revered stars as Erkin Koray, Orhan Gencebay and Sezen Aksu.

Even though it marked a rare foray into nonfiction, "Crossing the Bridge" was of a piece with the emerging Akin oeuvre, examining the contradictions that have animated all of Akin's films and, one senses, his life. With luck, "The Edge of Heaven" will introduce more viewers to a filmmaker who, in honing his own distinctive sensitivity, cinematic sense and humanism, is just getting better and better.