Configuring Affect: Complex World Making in Fatih Akın’s Auf der anderen Seite (The Edge of Heaven)

Through a close reading of Fatih Akın’s Auf der anderen Seite (The Edge of Heaven, 2007), this article undertakes a theoretical intervention into the cinematic study of affect. The proposed model of narrative as a world-making assemblage of affects, associations, images, words, and sounds integrates signification-critical, affirmation-oriented approaches to affect with a continued critique of ideology. In developing how the film’s complex narrative intertwines distanciation and affect, I probe how we can turn to “good feelings” without disregarding the legacies of inequality that block them in the contemporary world.