‘Crossing’ Review: Levan Akin’s Boundary Crossing Film is An Emotional Plea For Trans Acceptance [Berlinale]

A film that invokes its title in myriad ways, Levan Akin’s newest film, “Crossing,” is predominantly concerned with the differences that emerge across national and gendered identities. A plea for trans acceptance that never preaches to its audience, Akin’s film grounds the story of trans identity in Georgia and Turkey through the narrative of two disparate characters searching for someone in a city they don’t know.

Opening in Batumi, on the coast of Georgia, the film begins as Lia (Mzia Arabuli) searches for her niece, Tekla. While the reasons aren’t spelled out until late in the movie, one gets the sense that she made a deathbed promise to her sister. Her search takes her to the home of a former student, whose younger brother Achi (Lucas Kankava) quickly remembers Tekla as a sex worker who used to live near them. Telling Lia that she went to Istanbul, he promises to show her where he can also tag along.

Thus begins an odd journey between the older woman and young man as they attempt to navigate the overcrowded city, working their way through the streets and further getting to know the tight-knit community of trans sex workers. One of those is Evrim (Deniz Dumanl), a trans woman and former sex worker who now works as a lawyer for a non-profit advocating for trans rights. The film cuts between their narratives, with Lia and Achi mainly unable to speak the language and Evrim trying to move out of her previous work while still advocating for those she knows.

While Akin’s structure suggests a type of panoptic approach to trans identity in Istanbul — through Lia and Achi’s naivete and Evrim’s hardened views — the film is more nuanced in its approach, eschewing polemics to, instead, ground this story in fully realized characters. It’s perhaps obvious that Lia is attempting to atone for her family’s reaction to Tekla’s identity. But she’s never given the smoothed-out maternal identity that films of this nature usually try to push.

She makes it quite clear that while Achi is welcome to tag along, she is not taking care of him. She’s single-minded in her quest to find Tekla, even if she doesn’t have a plan for what to do afterward. Further, Achi’s longing for escape might animate his decision to go with Lia, but his character eventually reveals himself to be more invested in Lia’s cause than he initially seems. Evrim, at first, appears to be extraneous, as the film cuts to her story without a sense of how it links back to our central characters before revealing the connections that the three share.

She also speaks to Turkey’s treatment of its LGBTQ+ population, especially sex workers. Evrim is belittled by the doctors she sees in an effort to change her gender on official forms and also by the police, who remind her of her previous work. But, at the same time, Akin doesn’t reduce these characters to archetypes, allowing the three space to explore their conflicted feelings and identities.

This is no more true than with Lia, which Arabuli imbues with the hardened sense of a school teacher who is also yearning to break free. When she dances in the street after a drunken evening with fellow Georgian ex-patriots, it’s really quite magical. Kankava and Dumanil, both first-time actors, similarly bring an authentic sense of two people who have been trapped by their social standing.

When the film finally arrives at its conclusion, the journey to find Tekla almost becomes ancillary to the journey the central duo has gone on, crossing into an unknown country and community. Yet, in the end, the film suggests that despite the differences in age, gender, and experience between Lia, Achi, and Evrim, they nevertheless share a similar yearning for new experiences and acceptance. By exploring these similarities, Akin’s film draws connections to suggest that maybe through these crossings, we begin to understand each other. [A-]