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RELEASES Italy

Akin brings Heaven to Italy

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Just off of three European Film Award nominations (Best Film, Director and Screenplay), Turkish-German director Fatih Akin’s The Edge of Heaven [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Fatih Akin
interview: Klaus Maeck
film profile
]
is coming out in Italy.

Co-produced by Italian company Dorje Film, and a winner of screenplay award at this year’s Cannes, the director’s sixth feature is akin to the Berlin-based stories of Head-On [+see also:
trailer
film profile
]
(2003 Golden Bear) and musical documentary Crossing the Bridge [+see also:
trailer
film profile
]
, and will be released by BIM on November 9 on approximately 40 screens.

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“The film tackles many themes,” says Akin, “that are private and social, and I didn’t want the variety of problems to overwhelm audiences and force them to think as I do. I preferred to let them reflect, approaching the story with a documentary-like style, keeping the camera far from the events, in order to avoid political instrumentalisation as well”.

Akin does not feel himself to be a political director, and does not even like comparisons to Yilmaz Güney, the Kurdish filmmaker who made The Herd and Yol from jail, and who in his films “expressed his own Maoist-Leninist positions”.

“My point of reference is Rainer Werner Fassbinder, I want my work to be more philosophical than political,” he explained. It is no coincidence that the cast (in which an intense Nurgül Yesilçay, a star in Turkey, stands out), also features Hanna Schygulla, an icon of New German Cinema and the lead in many of Fassbinder’s melodramas.

However, political cinema was very important for him, personally and professionally. “Costa-Gavras’s Missing changed my life,” he said. “While my female friends loved Tom Cruise in Top Gun and my male friends went crazy over Rambo, that film convinced me that art can change the world. Or at least people.”

Akin is reticent to speak of his new project, the conclusion of a trilogy that began with Head-On and continued with The Edge of Heaven: “It will be a film on Evil, but it’s too soon to talk about it. Right now, it’s like a child in the first moments of a pregnancy: I still don’t know it’s sex, the colour of its eyes – I only hope it will be healthy. The same goes for the screenplay I’m writing: I hope it will be very healthy”.

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(Translated from Italian)

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