“Istanbul is a place where you go to disappear.” This sentence, pronounced by Lia, a retired history teacher who travels to the Turkish metropolis in search of her missing niece, is one that Levan Akin has often heard.
During his many trips to Georgia, his family’s home country, the Swedish filmmaker behind And Then We Danced (2019) met trans women who told him they were going to Istanbul to escape ostracism and “disappear into the city,” he told the New York Times. And it is a little of their story that the director stages here, in this luminous tale of intergenerational complicity which depicts transidentity with incredible tenderness.
Lia learns from Achi, a young vagabond neighbor, that Tekla, her trans niece who supposedly lived in a brothel in the neighborhood, has gone into exile in Istanbul. Wishing to honor the promise she had made to her deceased sister to find her daughter whom she had disowned, Lia crosses the Turkish border from her small Georgian town with the naive and clumsy Achi, who claims to be able to find Tekla’s address once she gets there.
The journey gives rise to a surprising friendship between the two characters who are complete opposites and to whom the masterful performances of actors Mzia Arabuli and Lucas Kankava give a disarming authenticity. Just like that of Deniz Dumanlı, in the role of Evrim, a trans volunteer working for an LGBTQ+ community center who comes to the aid of the protagonists, adrift in every sense of the word.
City of refuge
Thus, Levan Akin’s humanist gaze reveals a mosaic of characters who, despite the wounds inflicted on them by their macho societies, compose a very rare positive representation of trans identity. In fact, at every moment, the filmmaker deceives our expectations with bursts of tenderness when we might have believed that queer people would be persecuted. The relationship between Evrim and a taxi driver she meets by chance is in this regard one of the most charming examples of the normalization of trans stories that takes place throughout the film.
The elegance of Akin’s writing is matched only by the beauty of his images of Istanbul, where the Turkish metropolis is bathed in a soft orange light and almost becomes a character in its own right. We discover the city of refuge through the eyes of Lia, lost in the urban chaos, without it ever being represented like a postcard. And it is this staging of the city, with its different layers, that gives meaning to the complicity uniting Lia and Achi in their respective alienation.
In his interview with New York TimesLevan Akin said that filming the movie was a “form of therapy” for him, as a law “on family values and the protection of minors” is about to be voted on in the Georgian parliament. It includes a ban on gender affirmation surgeries, the sharing of information that would “popularize the identification with a gender different from biological sex” as well as the depiction of same-sex relationships.
Although Crossing will not be shown in Georgia, at least for now, because the director fears strong reactions due to the tense climate in his home country, we hope that the film crosses as many borders as possible, its overflowing humanity emerging as a glimmer of hope in a tradition of queer cinema too often marked by suffering.