Asylum

The Edge of Heaven, directed by Fatih Akin, is a carefully crafted, tender account of six interwoven lives. Ali is a effervescent Turkish expatriate living in Germany with his bookish son Nejat. The film begins with Ali inviting Yeter, a Turkish prostitute, to become his live-in girlfriend - much to Nejat's dismay. Yet Nejat quickly gains respect for the grim but kind hearted Yeter and after her sudden death, he returns to Turkey to search for her daughter Ayten. Ayten meanwhile, is a defiant political activist desperately refuge in Germany after an encounter with the Turkish police. Penniless and homeless, she is taken in by a German student named Lotte and her disapproving mother. When Ayten's asylum plea is rejected, Lotte follows Ayten to Istanbul to help secure her release from prison.

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): I have just come back from one of the most extraordinary political meetings I've ever been to in a long life of such events. It was the Mayoral hustings put on by London Citizens in the Methodist Central Hall, packed with well over 2,000 people. Neither the Labour Party nor the Conservative Party was mentioned by name and may just as well not have existed. The Lib-Dems and the Greens were named by their candidates but that was a sign of their marginality. The organisers put on a fantastic demonstration of politics from below, roll-calling the dozens of local organisations, schools, churches and faith communities that combined in what was both very London yet also drew upon American style populist organising and trade union solidarity. There was singing, there was a highly professional display of human causes unfolded with dignity and enjoyment. It felt genuinely representative. More on this I'm sure.

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): This time she was only acting but she plays the role of Elizabeth Wilmshurst, the Foreign Office legal adviser who resigned because the invasion of Iraq was not legal. It is in the first, I thought brilliant and clarifying, of eight Newsnight short films 10 Days to War. You can see it here. The discussion that followed was rubbish with Paxman at his disinterested worst. But you can't have everything and the films will last.

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): I was privileged to see Motherland directed by Juliet Stevenson last Sunday at the Young Vic. It was packed out and because of the demand they are now going to put on just two more performances both on Saturday 15 March. I have never seen anything quite like it, a skillful and engrossing mixture of drama and performance, witness and testimony, music and reporting. Go to it if you can. Its theme is the treatment and responses of children and mothers held in indefinite detention here in the UK because they are asylum seekers. It came about after Stevenson and Natasha Walter went to Yarl's Wood detention centre (one of 10 in the UK). They decided to give voice to those who could not speak. The script is read by young people as well as professional actors including Juliet Stevenson and her daughter Rosalind - Juliet also hosts the event very nicely. It is carefully dramatic. When it shocks you don't feel lectured you feel, well, you learn from a mother how she was separated from her new born child and offered pills to dry up her milk. After finally being rejoined with her skinny child it was suffering from "touch deprivation". This was described to us by Paola Dionisotti who acts one of the Yarl's Wood befrienders who help the mothers and provide intimate kit.

Jan Shaw (London, Amnesty International UK): There's a moment in Amnesty's new film, Still Human, Still Here: The Destitution of Refused Asylum Seekers, when a Zimbabwean woman picks up a photo of her son, whom she left behind five years ago, and starts to weep. "When I left Zimbabwe he was nine years old," she says, "Now he's 14."