Levan Akin’s Crossing is now showing exclusively on MUBI in many countries.
Crossing (Levan Akin, 2024).
Levan Akin’s tender, pensive new film begins in Batumi, the Georgian city where his family is from, and soon finds itself in Istanbul, “a place where people come to disappear,” as one character later muses. Forces of prejudice and patriarchy oppress these sister cities. In Batumi, Achi (Lucas Kankava) wakes to the sounds of a television talk show in a ramshackle house between the train tracks and the sea. A window over the sofa on which he sleeps frames the protean Black Sea, which hints at an escape route for the restless youth.
When a former schoolteacher, Lia (Mzia Arabuli), comes looking for her lost niece, Tekla, who was turned out by her family after transitioning, Achi’s hateful brother complains about “prostitutes” and “degenerates” in their midst. Having been evicted from the nearby cottage where she had been living, Tekla is now rumored to be in Istanbul. For Lia, finding her niece offers a sort of redemption, the fulfillment of her sister’s dying wish. Seeing an opportunity to escape his brother’s home and perhaps find his mother, Achi invites himself along. With open arms, Istanbul will embrace these two figures: the seasoned searcher and her young sidekick.
Akin captures Lia and Achi’s Istanbul adventures with little exoticism. We first glimpse this City with Seven Hills from the inside of a bus traversing a vast, ugly highway bridge. Akin spares us the ubiquitous drone shots, thank God, and the city’s historic wonders—the fabled palaces and hammams—are mercifully left untouched. A superb, continuous gimbal shot in an Istanbul vapur provides a faithful sense of stepping onto one of these boats amid a rush-hour crowd. Once you find a seat outside, though, all is forgiven, and you can savor the intercontinental passage, taking in the sights and sounds of hungry seagulls in search of food against the silhouettes of various seaside mansions, the Topkapı Palace, and the Hagia Sophia in the historical peninsula. This site of crossings—the ferry on the Bosphorus—will be a recurring locale in the film.
Crossing (Levan Akin, 2024).
We meet Evrim (Deniz Dumanli), Crossing’s third protagonist, enjoying a cigarette on the same vapur’s open-air upper deck. The activist lawyer works for Pembe Hayat, an LGBTQI+ solidarity organization established in 2006 to defend Turkey’s trans people. In Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s “New Turkey” (founded in opposition to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s secular and Europeanized Turkey), where Evrim lives, LGBTQI+ people are pushed to the margins. Turkey’s autocratic president considers gender nonconformity a perversion and recently pledged never to allow the LGBTQI+ “movements” to “infiltrate” his party’s ranks. Starting in 2014, when Erdoğan became president, the government banned all Pride events; by 2016, transgender people were being murdered in Turkey at a rate higher than in any other European country. When police officers harass Evrim (“Did you get your diploma from a circus?” one asks), they feel empowered by such toxic rhetoric. While receiving an official document that confirms she is female, Evrim faces similar comments, meant to humiliate her: “Have you ever done sex work before?” a doctor asks. Georgian and Turkish may be gender-neutral languages which make no distinctions of grammatical gender, as Crossing reminds us at its start, yet gender prejudices are deeply rooted in both cultures.
Akin gets the language of Istanbul’s trans communities just right, and Crossing refuses to exoticize the city. The cast of trans characters embodies a rich tradition of gender nonconformity in Turkish culture, using words like koli (one-night stand or sex partner), which are part of Lubunca, a Turkish cant and slang in use since Ottoman times. In the 17th and 18th centuries, these words might have been spoken among enslaved sex workers such as köçeks, male dancers dressed in feminine attire, and tellaks, young male attendants of hammams. Speaking a secret language helps insulate the community from the everyday violence of nationalists and Islamists, granting them relative anonymity and privacy.
The polyphonic Crossing is undoubtedly a companion piece to Akin’s And Then We Danced (2019), which broke my heart with its passionate portrayal of the plight of LGBTQI+ communities in Tbilisi and Batumi. It deftly interweaves various characters’ story arcs, as when two street kids introduced in the vapur scene reappear throughout the narrative, playing the saz on ferries and streets, working as paper collectors and city guides. They captivate audiences with sad songs and assist Lia and Achi in locating the apartment blocks where they begin their search for Tekla. Metonyms of Turkey’s oppressed, the young duo are universal symbols of regimes that fail their poor. They reminded me of figures from Vittorio de Sica’s postwar neorealist films, particularly Shoeshine (1946), which narrate stories of economic ruin through the eyes of children.
Crossing (Levan Akin, 2024).
Orhan Pamuk memorably characterized Istanbul using the concept of hüzün (the pain and sorrow over a loss), and Crossing’s depiction of the city is seasoned with the same melancholy. Akin’s film abounds with simit and chestnut sellers, shoeshiners, and praying Muslims. These people are not merely background to Lia and Achi’s search; instead, they and their habits take center stage and transform the searchers, reminding them how the quest for a loved one, or one’s sexual identity, or life’s meaning are similarly transformative. Elsewhere, Akin lovingly films Cihangir, Istanbul’s bohemian enclave, complete with its colorfully painted steps, 19th-century houses, heavy doors, and large population of cats—a reminder that the neighborhood is known as “the republic of cats” for a reason. Istanbul after hours is a vivid intersection of music and noise, parties and cruising. In one scene, Özge, a Circassian employee in their hostel, brings Achi to a queer party. In the morning, he wolfs down walnut baklava as a sad song by Sezen Aksu plays in the background. The experience will feel familiar for many locals of Cihangir, as it did for me.
Through the search for Tekla, Akin offers documentary-esque glimpses into the homes and domestic lives of Istanbul’s trans people. As they do their best to help Lia, one woman with a melancholy face wishes her own relatives had come looking for her. Others feel lucky they’ve escaped their homes alive. The violence against Turkey’s trans people is on display throughout: we learn of a trans girl shot dead by her father out of “shame.” Yet there is room for optimism, too. Orientalist, heteronormative cliches don’t intervene in Evrim’s affair with Ömer, a driver and aspiring teacher, and Akin captures their passionate lovemaking with tenderness and joy.
Crossing (Levan Akin, 2024).
When Lia and Achi fall out, Istanbul glues them back together. Spending a day in the city, crossing its Galata Bridge, and finally finding Achi sitting on the pavement and playing with a cat stirs something in Lia, and she offers him dinner. Ramaz, a Georgian man they meet that night, highlights Istanbul’s status as an immigrant hub. According to official numbers, more than one million foreigners live in Turkey's largest city, but anti-immigrant politicians are on the rise, and they employ rhetorical tropes similar to the language Erdoğan’s government uses to target trans communities, presenting immigrants as part of a meticulously designed Western plot to weaken Turkey’s public health and national security.
As I rewatched Crossing in Istanbul’s scathing heat this summer, I noticed how Tekla and Evrim symbolize for Lia the unrealized potential of her youth. Gulping down glasses of cold, misty rakı with Ramaz one night, dancing drunk on the street with others, and putting on crimson lipstick, Lia is liberated by her desperate search. Achi—defined by constant hunger, not only for food but also for transformation—also morphs into a semblance of maturity. Under Akin’s filmic gaze, he resembles the young and beautiful Jean-Paul Belmondo in Breathless (1960). Watching Achi ponder how his mother came to work in Turkey but never returned, it occurred to me that Istanbul, where people come to disappear, is also where many find themselves.