making connections
by Douglas Messerli
Levan Akin (screenwriter and director) Geçiş
(გადასვლა) (Crossing) / 2024
After the relative success of his truly
splendid 2019 film And Then We Danced about the near impossibility of
being openly homosexual in the country of Georgia, Swedish director (of
Georgian heritage) Levan Akin turned his attention to an even more fraught
issue, being a transgender person within that same culture.
The work begins in a rural community where a divisive family run by a fairly
macho and unthinking brute married to a submissive woman who together dwell with
the man’s younger and somewhat rebellious brother, Achi (Lucas Kankava) who
mostly fights with his sibling and participates in quasi illegal activities
such as running people back and forth between the nearby Turkish border with
his brother’s rundown car.
Suddenly a familiar face appears outside their hovel, Lia (Mzia Arabuli)
the man’s high school history teacher, for whom he obviously still has great
respect. She has come in search of any knowledge of a nearby encampment of
trans women, one of them being her sister’s transgender son.
Her former student denies any knowledge of them, except that one day
they all packed up and left; but his brother, who later reveals that his elder
sibling may have possibly visited the transgender prostitutes, suggests they
moved across the border into Turkey with the destination of Istanbul. When Lia
leaves the house, Achi runs after her, claiming to have an address to where she
was headed. He also begs Lia to let him join in the search, so desperate is he
to get out from the mean tutelage of his brother.
Lia is a sceptic who, taking one look at the boy, realizes his presence
will probably result in more problems than help. But he insists that he knows
some English and perhaps even a few words of Turkish and will be a quiet guide
for her.
Lia, who has promised her sister to seek her
child, now named Tekla, is certainly not at all thrilled about her mission, but
she is determined nonetheless, and finally realizes that perhaps even an unreliable
young guide like Achi might be helpful. She orders him to go home, pack up his
belongings, and meet her early the next morning, but before she has even gotten
halfway home, Achi appears again, this time in his brother’s stolen car,
insisting that he will drive her home and then on to the border where they will
catch a train to Istanbul.
Again with some reluctance she agrees to his suggestion, and so begins
an “on the road” adventure with the seemingly authoritarian yet committed Lia
and the unreliable but highly likeable Achi, undertaking a voyage to a city
even more wondrous and confusing than Oz on a search for what neither of them are
afraid they might find. In Georgia trans people are almost nonexistent, only occasionally
do you hear a story about a father who accidently killed his son while cleaning
his rifle. Transgender individuals almost always slip across the border and
disappear forever in order to survive.
Achi, as we might suspect, has lied. The address he claims was Tekla’s
destination was in fact a location for trans prostitutes he got off the
internet, none of the prostitutes having ever heard of a Tekla. He knows not a
word of Turkish and his English is sketchy at best.
Fortunately, Lia has come prepared with at least a day or two of basic
provisions and enough money to get them a few nights in a tawdry hostel with a
shared bathroom in the hall. Neither of them has a clue where to look or who to
even contact.
Yet somehow, despite the fact that Achi one night takes off and gets
drunk at a party to which he is invited to by two girls on the street,
resulting in Lia’s ousting him from her room, these to lost lambs bond and,
amazingly, find fortune is on their side.
Actually, Akin’s tale is a marvel of almost Dickensian coincidence, as
we follow Lia and Achi, two street
children—one of whom plays an instrument and who together beg for their daily
meals by offering up their services, including at on point guiding Lia and Achi
to the trans prostitute house—and a transgender woman Evrim (Deniz Dumanlı) who works of a LGBTQ help center—at
one point freeing the street boy from jail and eventually helping Lia find a brothel
where, at one point Tekla worked, leaving behind some of her possessions.
With a camera that seems as busy and crooked as Istanbul’s cat-ridden
streets, we observe how our central characters keep crisscrossing paths with
the others, along the way allowing us to get to know the children and Evrim,
the latter of whom finally gets a degree from the University of Istanbul which
allows her to become a legal assistant while also falling in love with an
unlicensed
taxi
driver (Ziya Sudancikmaz). Evrim’s encounters with the two children, moreover,
reveal her importance to the lives of Istanbul’s vast population of outsiders,
and her abilities to help track down Tekla’s previous whereabouts, demonstrates
her savvy and endless patience. If there is any figure in this film that helps
to open up narrow minds previously skeptical about transgender individuals, it
is this remarkable figure, and it is Evrim, in part, who utterly changes Lia
from a dour determinist to a loving human being.
Yet, we experience all of the figures as being on the cusp of remarkable
changes. Throughout the film, Achi spends a great deal of time just eating,
suggesting that he perhaps he has never before been given enough to whet his
appetite, but also hinting at his absolute hunger for life.
For Lia, the experiences she newly witnesses are almost all gathered in
the corners of her eyes. She silently observes it all, unable to communicate in
Turkish, for the first time in her life, perhaps, becoming the student rather
than the teacher. And we see her grow almost moment by moment as we observe her
taking in new visual, aural, and tactile experiences she has never before quite
imagined.
We also are witnesses to several other encounters that Lia and Achi have
in the city that help to change and heal both them. At a restaurant the duo
meet up with a friendly business man, formerly a Georgian, who properly wines
and dines them as Lia, hoping in part that he will help them but also somewhat charmed
by his attentions, for the first time reveals a whole new aspect of her
personality, rising to dance a traditional Georgian folk piece and, darting
into a bathroom, for the first time putting lipstick to her lips. By the time
she returns the businessman has run off, perhaps as Achi argues, having scared
him off in her sudden transformation, but utterly charming us and Achi, who
admits he now sees how she was once a beautiful young woman. Later, when Evrim
takes them to a restaurant, mostly closed because of a wedding party
celebration, she once more is asked to dance, this time by Achi, Evrim
eventually joining in, as we suddenly realize that our now beloved characters have
been thoroughly embraced by the heterosexual wedding party.
By film’s end Achi determines to stay on, having found work at the
hostel, while Lia begins the long trip home alone. But suddenly in a kind of
transcendent moment of imagination discovers Tekla on the Istanbul streets, the
two recognizing each other, and demonstrating their delight in finally seeing
one another again. Early in the film, Achi has challenged the older teacher by
asking her what she intends to say to Tekla once she finds her; Lia had no
answer.
Now, she fully invokes a wisdom that she might never been able to
express before meeting up with the many transgendered prostitutes and having
the opportunity to encounter Evrim: “I would tell her that we failed her. Her
mother and I. We did nothing for her. We lost so much time. We only cared about
what people would say about us. That’s what I would tell her. Despite of
everything, I would tell her that I love her too.”
Despite all the miracles of discovery people make in this film, Lia has
not miraculous discovered her niece. But she has come to discover the language
of love for when that time comes. And she now determines that she too will stay
in Istanbul and keep looking, that she will not abandon her responsibility for
loving as she has in the past. Perhaps she will even, once again, hook up with
Achi. The two of them, after all, have made a pretty powerful if failed approximation
of detectives, a rather absurd version of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. Yet
somehow, in this city that links Europe to Asia, they make the necessary
connections to bring love and meaning back into their lives.
Finally, this is a film that must be experienced; there is no proper way
to describe it. What happens is all expressed in faces of the central
characters, a raised eyebrow, a stare of amazement, a slight smile. By film’s
end, not only the fiction’s characters but the audience themselves have made the
significant crossing over that people like Tekla and Evrim had been forced to
make, a recognition that perhaps what we know of learn of ourselves from the
outside is not really who we are within.
Levin never preaches; he demonstrates, confabulates, imagines
connections that might never have otherwise existed. And in the end, were too
learn, forgive, and accept.
This film received the Teddy Award from the Berlin International Film
Festival.
Los Angeles, January 28, 2026
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January
2026).
