An interesting thing happens when the new Fatih Akin movie, Edge Of Heaven, comes to an end -- the credits roll, but nobody leaves the theatre.

The characters in this story are so compelling that the smallest chance of seeing a reconciliation between two of them keeps people glued to their seats.

Edge Of Heaven is an oddly hopeful movie, considering that it involves tragic loss, culture clash and heartbreaking twists of fate.

The storytelling moves back and forth in time and the characters move between Germany and Turkey, pushed and pulled by politics, by culture and by family.

Nejat (Baki Davrak) is Turkish, but second-generation in Germany, and he's a university professor in Hamburg.

Through his aged father, he meets a Turkish prostitute named Yeter, and later winds up going to Istanbul to find her daughter, Ayten.

Nejat has no way of knowing that Ayten (Nurgul Yesilcay) is already in Germany hoping to find her mother. Their paths cross, but Nejat and Ayten keep missing each other.

Ayten, meanwhile, is in Germany not just to find her mother but also because she's on the run for her political activities.

In a skirmish with police at home in Turkey, she drops her cell phone and the police pick it up, allowing them to identify Ayten's fellow activists. In the same skirmish, she finds and conceals a gun. You may be sure it surfaces later in the story.

Ayten is soon hungry and homeless in Germany, and she meets up, just by chance, with Lotte (Patrycia Ziolkowska), an earnest German student with no particular direction in life.

Lotte falls in love with Ayten and brings her home; this is not a happy situation as far as Lotte's mother Susanne (Hanna Schygulla) is concerned.

Soon enough, Ayten is deported back to Turkey. Lotte follows her there. So does fate.

There are two deaths in Edge Of Heaven, both announced almost like chapter titles in the movie. The third chapter, titled Edge Of Heaven (Auf der Anderen Seite is the original German title, which translates On the Other Side) concerns the characters as they deal with tragedy.

It appears that forgiveness is the key to all that has gone before, and the story ends where it began, in Turkey.

Like other of Fatih Akin's films, Edge Of Heaven is about people caught between two cultures, somehow belonging to both and to neither. The film has specific social and political elements; its themes of family and connectedness (in the face of chaos) are universal. Edge Of Heaven is slow and beautifully photographed, but watching the various characters move in and out of each other's lives becomes an oddly intense experience.

Even those who never meet up eventually find each other.

Edge Of Heaven, which has won several awards, is in German, Turkish and English, with English subtitles.

(This film is rated 14-A)

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