Fatih Akin

Fatih Akin is a German and Turkish director, screenwriter and producer, and nearly everything he has directed runs along the seam between the two countries. Head-On, which took the Golden Bear at Berlin in 2004, is the harshest of them: a marriage of convenience that neither party can keep at arm's length. The Edge of Heaven runs a set of German and Turkish lives past each other, missing by inches, and won Best Screenplay at Cannes in 2007.

What he is good at is casting and noise. Akin shoots people who shout, drink, cook and work, and he lets a scene run well past the point where a tidier director would cut away. Soul Kitchen is that instinct in comic form, a restaurant farce with real appetite in it. The Golden Glove is the same instinct with every comfort removed, a squalid Hamburg bar picture that makes admiring it feel like a dare. The two films are four years apart and it is hard to believe the same person made them, which is the argument for him.

In the Fade won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film and is his most conventional piece of construction, a grief-and-courtroom story resting on a single performance. The Cut, his Armenian genocide epic, was the biggest swing and the least discussed. He has kept working steadily through the coming-of-age Goodbye Berlin and on to Amrum in 2025, and he still takes small parts in front of the camera, including a Romanian border official in In July and a fighter in Rhinegold.