In Crossing, Lia (Mzia Arabuli), a retired history teacher from Georgia, partners with a boy in his late teens, Achi (Lucas Kankava), to find her long-lost niece, a trans woman who goes by Tekla (Tako Kurdovanidze). It’s an unlikely partnership between the severe, matronly Lia and the incorrigible Achi, whose priority is to escape his older brother’s oppressive household. He tells Lia he has Tekla’s address in Istanbul, offering to serve as a guide and translator, and the two set out the next morning to cross the Georgian border into Turkey. A parallel narrative follows Evrim (Deniz Dumanli), a trans woman and former sex worker starting to live her best life in Istanbul, having recently obtained her law degree and official female ID.
Lia and Achi’s search takes them all over Istanbul, and on one level, Levan Akin’s film is a love letter to the city. Levan doesn’t ignore the patriarchy and bureaucracy that people face here, but he downplays them in order to show the more cosmopolitan side of this crossroads between the “East” and the “West.” Among those whom Evrim or Lia and Achi encounter are queer, communitarian sex workers and scrappy orphans, a lavish Georgian expat and a broad-minded pirate-taxi driver (Ziya Sudancikmaz), not to mention the ubiquitous stray cats.
In a film of this length, there are simply too many of these colorful characters to amount to much beyond that, and they take valuable screen time away from the protagonists. Taken together, though, they make up a milieu of outsiders and misfits who’ve carved out a tenuous way of life. At one point, as Lia considers the possibility that Tekla may not want to be found, she speculates that this city is also a place where people come to disappear.
The film’s title alludes, of course, to its principal action and theme, but Crossing doesn’t limit itself to a trite conflation between migration and gender transition. Lia and Achi’s literal crossing from Georgia to Turkey is underwhelming. As Achi says, “It looks exactly the same…Isn’t this a different country?” The ferry crossing over the Golden Horn, on the other hand, from one side of Istanbul to another, turns out to be quietly momentous. It’s in this scene that the film crosses perspectives, when the camera tilts up from Lia and Achi on the main deck to the observation deck above, depositing us in Evrim’s part of the story for a while.
For the remainder of Crossing, the two perspectives and plotlines crisscross, with the characters at one point traversing the same streets at different times of day and Achi, at another point, finding himself at the same rooftop dance party as Evrim. The mere crossing of the frame is charged with meaning, as when Lia strides purposively at a diagonal from upper right to bottom left of the frame in Crossing’s first shot—matching the geographical disposition of Georgia and Turkey on a map—a shot with many echoes throughout Akin’s film.
Perhaps the most subtle yet significant permeable boundary here is the one separating lies from truth, fantasy from reality. Crossing’s plot hinges on multiple cases of mistaken identity and false pretense that lead serendipitously to epiphany, especially for Lila. The most consequential of these is Achi’s lie that he has Tekla’s address, and how it steers Lia and him in the direction of Evrim. The preponderance of such twists places the film in danger of presenting trans identity as another instance of false pretense or mistaken identity that becomes real only when recognized outwardly, or worse officially. But in tracing Lia’s journey from a place of ignorance, fear, and neglect and to one of relative self-awareness, Crossing is never less than nobly intent on showing trans people as worthy of dignity, safety, and love.
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