Starring Baki Davrak, Nursel Kí¶se, and Hanna Schygulla. In English, German, and Turkish with English subtitles. Rated 14A. Opens Friday, September 5, at the Cinemark Tinseltown

The German title Auf der Anderen Seite—meaning On the Other Side and, more colloquially, On the Other Hand—better expresses the ambivalence paralyzing the characters in this soulful and potent new drama. Caught between their Turkish and German identities, these folks are nowhere near paradise, but they are searching for something like redemption.

This was true, more narrowly, of the screwed-up protagonists in writer-director Fatih Akin’s 2004 breakthrough, Head-On. Here, in an effort that grabbed the screenwriting prize at this year’s Cannes fest and a number of other top awards, Akin uses a larger canvas to tell the story of people united, and divided, by politics, sex, and accidental death.

Like the director, youngish Nejat (Baki Davrak) is a German-born intellectual still figuring out how he got saddled with Turkish working-class parents. A lit professor at a Bremen university, Nejat barely sees his father, the hard-drinking Ali (Tuncel Kurtiz). But this changes when his dad brings home a Turkish prostitute (the excellent Nursel Kí¶se) with troubles of her own.

Through complicated developments, the teacher ends up in Istanbul, looking for the sad hooker’s grown daughter, Ayten (Nurgí¼l Yesilí§ay). Unbeknownst to them, the angry young woman is caught up with revolutionaries being hunted by the police.

While Nejat keeps exploring the ashes of the Ottoman Empire, Ayten is on her way to Hamburg, where she finds refuge in the home of a student whose mother is played by Rainer Werner Fassbinder muse Hanna Schygulla.

The movie is more carefully wrought and graceful than it initially appears, with its gritty, everyday settings and oblique edits, which sometimes take us back to things we thought had already happened but are, in fact, just beginning. Tragedy and dumb luck shadow these characters like the history of two continents colliding. In the end, the survivors face each other with a kind of serenity. It’s not heaven, but they are on the edge of something.