Filmmaker Fatih Akin's newest movie, Edge Of Heaven, crosses cultures and generations.

The drama moves between Germany and Turkey and among mothers and daughters and fathers and sons.

The family element is not surprising, says the director: "I became a father when I wrote this script." Akin was writing Edge Of Heaven all during his wife Monique's pregnancy and their baby's first few months of life.

"And it had a huge impact, not just on my life but on this project. The thoughts I had, the emotions I had, the relationship -- to have a father and become a father, to be in the middle like that -- it keeps a certain view of things that ended up in the film."

Akin, 34, was born in Germany to Turkish parents. The successful filmmaker often examines the two cultures in his movies, and both countries claim him as a native son.

Edge Of Heaven, which is set in Hamburg and Istanbul, reflects the cultural views of both the older and the younger generation. Specifically, it shows how those views have changed with the passage of time. And how they haven't.

"It's a very universal theme," says Akin, who was in Toronto when Edge Of Heaven premiered at the film festival, "and this is almost a regional example, this Turkish-German gap. You have almost the same thing in the United States with the Mexicans, the same thing in Japan with the Koreans, in England with the South Asians. My parents moved to Germany in the 60s. It was a post-war country with more work than workers, so they were invited to work.

"But no one expected that they would have their children there, or that their children would have their children there. So a new cultural generation was born and thrived."

For Akin, the big change is how small the world has become. Now, the distance between Turkey and Germany, in these times of globalization, seems like nothing.

"But when I was a child, in the '70s, they were very far apart. We'd drive there, and it was three days of driving. Now we fly there in three hours. We're on the move. Once you're moving between those two motherlands, your identity is always in motion. I think that's a good thing. You feel like a citizen of the world."

Akin studied at Hamburg's College of Fine Arts and made his first film in 1995, a short called Sensin -- You're The One! His work was recognized immediately. The film won the Audience Award at Hamburg's Short Film Festival.

He has won dozens of major film awards since that auspicious debut. Short Sharp Shock was his first feature, and his other movies include In July, Solino, Head-On and Crossing The Bridge -- The Sound Of Istanbul.

Of his career, he says, "I became a storyteller very early, from the age of seven, because my mother was a teacher and she taught me to read and write before I went to school."

Akin sat and wrote stories while the other kids were learning to read. As a child, he encountered Turkish culture through the movies his parents rented and watched at home.

"My family was one of the first to have a VHS, and from the age of seven, that was my toy. We watched a lot of Turkish films. Aunts and uncles came with tons of films. We'd watch five or six on the weekend. I watched more films when I was eight and nine and 10 than I do today. There was no doubt I would become a filmmaker. I always knew this was my thing."

For his next project, Akin says he has several irons in the fire. He's working on a documentary and on a comedy, but he has his eye on America.

"I'm fascinated by America, by this continent. People going to find a new home and stuff, that's a common theme in all my films, and it's America's basic one."

Akin hopes to make a movie about the people who came to America early in the 20th century, and his interest is in the immigrants who had a tough time of it.

"I think sadness, suffering, is part of the human condition," he says.

"I'm not a sad person in my everyday life, but I think it's because I have the opportunity to put my sadness in my films. That's why I'm very thankful. It's holy work, filmmaking. It's good work. I like it."

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