The Edge Of Heaven

Though there is only one 'proper' extra here, it is uncommonly substantial.

Coming in at 57 minutes, Fatih Akin: Diary of a Film Traveler is a sort of making-of diary (covering pre-production, the shoot and post-production) narrated (in subtitled German) by Fatih Akin. The writer/director designates The Edge Of Heaven "a humanistic film, a film about how people function", as well as being about "acts of love" and "forgiveness".

Akin speaks of his great joy in uniting two "legends" from the classic cinema of different cultures, in the persons of Fassbinder favourite Hanna Schygulla and Turkish luminary Tuncel Kurtiz. The performance of the former, he claims, dissatisfied him on set but stunned him once he saw it on screen – while the latter he describes as "a wild man who knows how to live" and is full of ideas. Apparently the story began life as a thriller, before undergoing considerable changes during the process of location scouting and cast rehearsals. The editor Andrew Bird adds that the screenplay's structure was radically altered in post-production.

If The Edge of Heaven is concerned with the bridges between opposites, then this extra is the perfect bridge between the typical director's commentary and the average behind-the-scenes featurette – for it is more tightly structured than the one, and more insightful than the other. Excellent.