Crossing

A Georgian woman searches for her runaway niece in Istanbul, in this tender love letter to transgender communities in Georgia and Turkey.

Levan Akin is a Swedish director and screenwriter of Georgian ethnic origin. That is, his parents emigrated to Sweden from the Soviet republic of Georgia in the 1960s, before he was born. After doing some television and film set in Sweden, he started to explore his Georgian heritage, regularly visiting the now independent country. He caused controversy there with a drama about gay men called And Then We Danced, which sparked protests when shown in Georgia, the Orthodox Church condemning it. An out gay man himself, Akin continues to defy conservative Georgian culture in his latest film, about transgender women and those who love them, entitled Crossing.

Crossing begins with characteristic indirection in a town on the Black Sea, where a bad-tempered man with a pregnant wife heaps abuse on a younger man living in his house because he borrowed the car without permission. The young man, we assume, is his son, but it’s a consistent practice of this movie to allow us to make incorrect assumptions. Achi, we eventually discover, is his younger brother, smarting under the overbearing authority of his sibling.

A middle aged woman visits the house—Lia, a former schoolteacher who at one time had the older brother as a student. She’s looking for her niece, Tekla, who’s been missing for over a year since running away from her family home. Do they know anything about her? The couple says no, but then the younger brother speaks up and says she was one of the trans girls who had been living nearby until recently. The brother tells him to shut up. Later, as Lia is walking away on the shoreline, Achi runs after her. He knew Tekla, he says, and she gave him an address in Istanbul to give to anyone who asked about her. After giving Lia the address, he begs her to take him along on her journey. He desperately wants to get away from his situation, and he knows a little Turkish and English, which could help her in her search. Lia, who frowns most of the time and behaves very cautiously, reluctantly agrees. They take a bus to the Turkish border and cross over to Istanbul.

The film is centered around the excellent performance of the actress playing Lia, Mzia Arabuli, a veteran of Georgian film whose face reflects long-suffering patience and stoicism. Ever so gradually, Arabuli allows the secrets of her character’s life to emerge. Her companion Achi, in his twenties but a kid really, a country boy who knows nothing of urban life, is annoyingly impulsive and talks too much, but has a good heart, and finds himself becoming attached to the older woman as a kind of mother figure. Their relationship is difficult, though, Lia having to tell him more than once that she’s not there to take care of him. Then, at one point, on a ferry boat, the camera pulls up a level and we follow a trans woman, an outgoing advocate for the queer community played by Deniz Dumanli. Could this be Lia’s missing niece?

In Istanbul, with little money, Lia and Achi try to navigate a neighborhood mostly populated by sex workers, but their search for Tekla keeps hitting dead ends. Lia is continually challenged by the people she meets in this place. Arabuli is great here. The spiritual journey she portrays is intense. A fine emotional twist about two thirds of the way through is followed by a deeply moving one near the end. Crossing is a beautiful and finely crafted labor of love.