Auf der anderen Seite (the other side)
The cinema in Cluny is having a week of Middle Eastern movies, and it started off with this one, made by a Turkish-German director called Fatih Amin who is in his mid-thirties. A strong start.

The two sides that are referred to in the film's title could be the German and Turkish cultures, but they could just as well be the older and younger generations of people in families, regardless of culture or background. Or they could be life and death, for that matter.

The story unwinds at a gentle pace which some people might find plodding, but I enjoyed its calmness. It revolves around three parents and their adult children. There's an elderly Turkish man and his son, who is a university lecturer, both of whom are living in Germany. There's a German mother, played with wonderfully subtle understatement by Hanna Schygulla. Her daughter is a student who befriends the final "child" of the story, a young Turkish political refugee whose mother is working as a prostitute in Bremen.

In the course of the story, two of these characters die unexpectedly (or at least, their deaths are unexpected as far as the other characters are concerned - the audience is warned about them beforehand). The others are left to try and figure out where to go from there.

The decisions the survivors eventually make are entirely believable, and to me also deeply heartening and inspiring. Akin said in an interview that he wanted to provide a different interpretation of death from Bergman's pessimism, and I think he succeeds.

Along the way he also raises a great many interesting questions about globalisation, same-sex relationships, Turkey and the EU, gender roles, prostitution, immigration and religious fundamentalism. And to top it all off, the film has lots of great music and features a poky little bookshop with overstuffed chairs and cats. So, well worth seeing.

(By the way, the English-language version is called The Edge Of Heaven. You can see a clip from it on You Tube here).