‘Crossing’: The Year’s Brightest, and Most Moving, Foreign Film

Languages, communities, lifestyles, borders, and values may separate us, but sadness and loneliness are universal, as is the desire to know ourselves and to find acceptance, forgiveness, and togetherness.

Crossing, writer/director Levan Akin’s film about an older Georgian woman searching for her trans niece in Turkey, understands and dramatizes that basic fact with an avalanche of empathy that’s all the more overpowering for being so gentle. Premiering in U.S. theaters on July 19 following its world premiere at February’s Berlin International Film Festival, it’s one of the year’s brightest, and most moving, imports.

In the small coastal Georgian town of Batumi, retired teacher Lia (Mzia Arabuli) arrives on the doorstep of a former student named Zaza (Levan Bochorishvili) who’s busy chastising his younger brother Achi (Lucas Kankava) for taking his car without permission. This is clearly not the first time the siblings have bickered over such matters, yet they pause their fighting long enough to invite Lia inside for a drink, over which she informs them that she’s looking for her niece Tekla, whose mother (Lia’s sister) has recently passed away.

Zaza claims ignorance about Tekla, but Achi remembers that she’s one of the trans girls who lived nearby until they were kicked out of their house. Upon departing, Lia is tracked down by Achi, who admits that he knew Tekla and has her address in Istanbul, where she’s living with friends. Arguing that he can speak a bit of Turkish and English (the latter from YouTube) and must get away from his brother, he convinces Lia to let him tag along on her quest.

With a head of curly black hair, a mole beneath her nose, and a stern expression consistently affixed to her face, Lia carries herself like a person with whom one does not trifle, and the younger Achi proves an initial annoyance to her. A brief trip to Lia’s house indicates that she had cared for her ill sister there. After gathering some tomatoes and cucumbers from the neighbor’s garden (and, in the morning, accepting a generous gift of pelamushi from them), Lia and Achi cross into Turkey, where he has never visited and she has only been once, years earlier. “It was all right” she says about Istanbul in her typically brusque manner. On their ensuing bus ride, Achi foolishly munches on the churchkhela being passed from passenger to passenger, and shortly thereafter winds up puking out the window—a sign of his immature irresponsibility.

Staring at a flirty woman on the bus, Lia remarks that Georgian women have lost all dignity. This suggests that Lia is a conservative with untoward opinions about the world into which she’s entering, and yet Crossing has no interest in being a simplistic scold. Once in Turkey, the duo board a ferry and director Akin’s camera lithely glides up and down stairs, considering the ship’s passengers and employees with the same casual warmth that it extends to its protagonists.

Those, it turns out, also include Evrim (Deniz Dumanli), a trans lawyer who disembarks from the same vessel and meets up with a friend, who chats with her about her latest boyfriend and her volunteering gig at an LGBTQ+-focused NGO. Evrim is in the process of getting her official female ID, and the way in which a doctor refuses to look at her during an office visit illustrates the everyday discrimination she endures, just as her decision to praise his hair on her way out demonstrates the kindness with which she faces it.

Lia and Evrim’s paths are fated to intersect in Crossing, although Akin’s script takes its time getting to its preordained destination, content as it is to travel alongside the aunt and Achi as they wander through bustling streets, up steep staircases, and down empty alleyways.

At every opportunity, the film reveals clues about its characters’ thoughts, feelings, and pasts through subtle expressions and interactions. That’s true whether it’s an encounter with a Georgian man that compels Lia to briefly come out of her shell (to unsuccessful ends), Evrim’s budding amour with a cabbie, or a chat with a trio of Turkish trans women who can’t understand anything Lia is saying (and vice versa) but who nonetheless share a moment when one of them is prompted to sing a melancholy song. Akin’s soundtrack is filled with similar woeful tunes, all of which reflect these individuals’ regrets, sorrow, and longing.

While Arabuli’s performance begins as an exercise in stone-faced dourness, the actress soon evokes the complex stew of emotions driving Lia forward on her mission. Her anger, despair, disgust, and self-recrimination are believable because they’re largely unarticulated and, moreover, uneasily reconcilable. Lia feels more than one thing about Tekla’s choices, as well as her own role in driving her niece to this place, and the film’s embrace of life’s untidiness bolsters its sympathy for her plight.

That additionally goes for its treatment of Achi and Evrim, who are likewise grappling with issues of rejection, alienation, and yearning for love and companionship. Crossing handles these dynamics with consistent deftness, such that even Lia and Achi’s surrogate mother-child bond resonates not as a schematic device but as an unexpected (if natural) outgrowth of their developing relationship.

Asked what she’ll do once she locates Tekla, Lia states that she has no future and thus no plans; “I’m just here until I’m not.” If she sounds forlorn, however, she isn’t without hope for reconciliation, absolution, and solace.

Crossing passes no judgment on its main characters, instead comprehending them from the inside out in all their knotty, contradictory, and ultimately optimistic glory. Its spirit is so tender and welcoming that it’s impossible not to have enormous compassion for its wayward souls. Akin’s film is about estranged and adrift people who haven’t quit on mending themselves and the messes they’ve made (or have been saddled with), and its gracefulness and graciousness are equally enchanting.

In its poignant conclusion, Crossing offers little overt resolution but, in a vital sense, finds Lia completing the most important part of her odyssey. Akin doesn’t untangle his main character’s inner life; rather, he simply recognizes that healing is a process that both begins with oneself and is aided by those we allow into our lives and hearts.