It's hardly a surprise that members of the European Parliament last year voted The Edge of Heaven the first winner of the Lux Prize for European Cinema. According to parliament president Hans Gert Pottering, the newly-created award is to be given to productions that raise questions affecting the continent and highlight issues such as European integration and the 'richness of linguistic diversity within the European Union'.

Fatih Akin's film fits the bill perfectly. The Edge of Heaven thoroughly explores Turkey's fraught relationship with Germany and Europe, either through allegory with German and Turkish protagonists depicting the schisms between their cultures, or through explicitly political plot lines, such as the discussion between exiled Turkish political activist Ayten (Nurgul Yesilcay, right) and middle-class German intellectual Susanne (Hanna Schygulla) about how the former's life would improve if and when Turkey joins the European Union.

The famously fiery Akin would never deliver a solely academic exercise about international relations, however. What makes The Edge of Heaven a spellbinding experience is its spot-on observations of the nuances in the personalities it follows - the bleeding-heart liberal who's wary of an outsider in her home, a Turkish sex worker trading herself in Germany for the education of her daughter back at home, or a westernised Turkish professor confused about his cultural roots.

Pitch-perfect performances abound in The Edge of Heaven, and such convincing turns add power to Akin's masterfully crafted screenplay, driven by sharp comments about the status quo and a story of intertwining lives joined together by dislocation and death.

The protagonists carry around conflicting emotions: apart from Ayten and Susanne, there's the former's mother, sex worker Yeter (Nursel Kose) whose frivolity belies her concerns about her family back home; literary academic Nejat (Baki Davrak), who goes to Istanbul to look for Ayten when Yeter dies accidentally at the hands of his retiree father Ali (Tuncel Kurtiz); and Susanne's daughter Lotte (Patrycia Ziolkowska), an idealist whose love for Ayten drives a wedge between her and her mother and leads to her premature demise.

The Edge of Heaven's multifarious narrative is less contrived than last year's Babel. The story's rhythm ebbs and flows through joy (the explosive happiness radiating from Ayten and Lotte together, or the more subtle affections between Yeter and Ali), confusion (Ayten's life as an exile and then prisoner; Nejat's complex feelings towards his father and his father's country) and abject grief (Schygulla's depiction of Susanne unravelling at the seams, after a deadly turn of events, is superb).

The Edge of Heaven opens today