By Sandra Hall
CROSSING
★★★★
TBC, 105 minutes. In cinemas April 24
Crossing is set on the junction between East and West. It opens on the outskirts of a small village on the Georgian coast of the Black Sea, where Lia (Mzia Arabuli), a stately woman with a commanding expression, is knocking on doors to ask if anyone knows where her niece might be.
The niece, Tekla, is transgender and her mother has just died, leaving behind an unfulfilled wish. Lia has been given the job of finding Tekla and making sure that she’s all right.
Mzia Arabuli in the film Crossing.Credit: Edje Ali
It’s a film which has you in its grip from the start. Arabuli’s Lia may not know where she’s going but she’s so determined and so stoic that you know she’s not going to give up until she gets there. Achi (Lucas Kankava), an aimless young man living with his loutish brother in one of the shacks she visits, knows it too. For him, she represents a means of escape. He tells her that he has Tekla’s address in Istanbul. Then he talks her into taking him along. So begins a trip which will alter the course of both their lives.
Georgian writer-director Levan Akin is based in Sweden and this is the second script he’s done about characters stigmatised because of their sexuality. In Georgia and Turkey, “wokeness” is a foreign concept and although his earlier film, And Then We Danced (2019), was Sweden’s official entry for the Oscars, it met with fierce protests, some of them violent, when released in Georgia.
Lucas Kankava and Mzia Arabuli in Crossing.Credit: Haydar Taştan
Not that it’s deterred him. This one is just as contentious – based on a true story he heard in Georgia about a man who stood up for his trans granddaughter after the rest of the family turned against her.
Lia reluctantly puts up with Achi’s presence. There’s a slight chance that he may be telling the truth about Tekla, although that possibility becomes more remote as time goes on. Nonetheless, she takes to him. After all, he’s another lost soul and he’s useful, introducing her to parts of the city she might not have found had she been alone.
Levan Akin’s multi-award-winning Crossing is set in Istanbul.Credit: Edje Ali
And with their explorations comes a new understanding. They begin in a street of brothels and get nowhere until they come across Evrim (Deniz Dumanli), a trans woman with a hard-won law diploma who becomes their guide to the subterranean world of the city’s sex trade.
The film’s great strength is that everyone is given their due, no matter how small the part they play. We follow two endearingly self-possessed street kids who have taught themselves to busk and to scavenge for food. And we get to know Evrim, who can’t quite bring herself to give up her faithless boyfriend even though the law diploma has given her enough confidence to weather the condescension she meets in her dealings with the local policemen.
But it’s Lia who undergoes the greatest change, revealing fragments of her past life bit by bit. Her default manner is based on irony bolstered by the air of authority she acquired during her years teaching history to recalcitrant Georgian teens.
And cocky Achi, who has difficulty sitting still for five minutes, amuses her but more importantly, he surprises her with his resourcefulness. And once that happens, her defences are down.
Levan really seems to know and care about these people. They’re not case studies illustrating the plight of his favourite minorities. Far from it. They’re strong-minded and sometimes cranky individuals who are very capable of making up their own way in a very tricky world.
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