A belated follow-up to Fathi Akin's visceral and dynamic Head-On, this is a very different kind of movie, though again Germany and Turkey are all tangled up and lowlife is again to the fore. It deliberately recalls Germany's late, great director Fassbinder — who got the inter-racial Gastarbeiter thing rolling with Fear Eats the Soul (1974) — both in subject matter and because it features his muse of the 70s, the great Hanna Schygulla. Schygulla here plays a mother whose headstrong daughter gets romantically involved with a Turkish illegal immigrant wanted by the police. There's a parallel story about a Turkish prostitute who moves in with the father of a German professor and there are two deaths, foretold in caption form. The theme is parents and children and Akin requires you to join up the dots and form a complete interlinked picture, something which the protagonists never quite can.

The film's literal title is On the Other Side, which better reflects the border between life and death as well as the geographical one between countries and ways of life. Its theme is a lot like Paul Haggis' Crash, another film that was impressively acted but badly let down by the huge coincidences its plot requires. It rather has the feel of a bridging device, as Akin intends it to be the second part of a trilogy about "love, death and the devil". His screenplay won an award at Cannes, but as drama, it never quite lives up to this summer's Germany-Turkey semi-final, TV transmission breaks and all.