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
