Fatih Akin's 2007 film Auf der anderen Seite (On the Other Side/On the Edge of Heaven) traces seven characters’ liminal lives as they venture across or are caught between national, political, cultural, gender, and familial boundaries. Two young star-crossed lovers, Ayten (Nurgül Yeşilçay) and Charlotte/Lotte (Patrycia Ziolkowska), find and lose each other in the process of transgressing national, political, and heterosexual boundaries. Ali (Tuncel Kurtiz), a first-generation Turkish migrant, lives in Bremen, where his love interest, Yeter (Nursel Köse), has been working in the red-light district. Yeter is Ayten's estranged mother. After a drunk Ali hits Yeter and the fall kills her, he ends up in prison and is subsequently expelled to Turkey. Ali's adult son Nejat (Baki Davrak), a professor of German literature at the University of Hamburg, opens and closes the film in the form of a road trip to his father's village along the Black Sea coast. In Istanbul, the expat Markus (Lars Rudolph) runs a German bookstore. He turns it over to Nejat, who in turn asks Lotte's grieving mother Susanne (Hannah Schygulla), to mind it during his trip to reconnect with his father.

In Auf der anderen Seite, mobility and migration are multi-sourced and multi-directional, demonstrably rewarding and lethal at the same time. Akin does not depict mobility and migration ‘as one way traffic from country of origin to host society, but rather as more mobile scenarios, axial stories, multisited lives and itinerant identities, each of which nevertheless maintains a sense of situated actors and of agency’. The film's characters display an identity concept that Deniz Göktürk defines as ‘itinerant’. Migration is a response to an existential crisis that forces individuals to adapt to rapidly changing contexts and situations.