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The Week in Germany: Culture October 26, 2007 Film Flash: First EU Film Prize goes to Fatih Akin's "The Edge
of Heaven"
Turkish-born Fatih Akin, the German director of Auf der Anderen Seite (The Edge of Heaven), won the European Parliament's first "LUX" prize for cinema on Wednesday (Oct. 24). The Lux award and its Tower of Babel-inspired trophy, which looks like a shiny silver stacked-up roll of film, means the German-language film will now be subtitled in all 22 other official EU languages. In Akin's absence, European Parliament President Hans-Gert Pöttering presented the award in Strasbourg - where the Brussels-based Parliament also meets regularly - to the film's producer Klaus Maeck, and leading German actress Hanna Schygulla, the famous former Rainer Werner Fassbinder muse. Pöttering, a longtime member of German Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU), part of the center-right European People's Party (EPP) group in Parliament, stressed that the aim of the prize was "to illustrate the linguistic richness and artistic creativity" of European cinema. The film portrays a Turkish widower who decided to move in with a prostitute despite his son's misgivings. The son, a young German teacher, warms to the new woman in his father's life, Yeter, when he realises that she sends most of what she earns to her daughter in Turkey to pay for her university education. Yeter's accidental death drives a wedge between father and son and leads them both back to Istanbul. "The Edge of Heaven," which features both German and Turkish actors, is the second film in a trilogy. It began with Akin's Gegen die Wand (Head On), a riveting cross-cultural tour de force that plays out between his native Hamburg and Istanbul, which won the 2004 Golden Bear prize at the Berlin International Film Festival. And recently the film was selected by an expert panel in Germany to represent Germany at the 2008 Oscars, for which the final lineup of foreign film entries will be announced next January in Los Angeles. Last year, another German film, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others) won the Oscar for best foreign film.(TWIG/Federal Foreign Office, using www.dw-world.de material dated Oct. 25, 2007) Links: EP interview with Edge of Heaven producer Klaus Maeck Fatih Akin to Build New York's Ellis Island as Film Set (TWIG, Oct. 19, 2007) Double Honor for Turkish-German Director Fatih Akin's Latest Film at Cannes (TWIG, June 1, 2007) German MEP Elected European Parliament President (TWIG, Jan. 19, 2007) |
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