“And Then We Danced” director Levan Akin returns with another intense and moving queer drama, “Crossing.” Winner of a jury prize at the 2024 Berlinale Film Festival and will next screen next week at Tribeca Festival, “Crossing” opens in arthouses across the country later this summer. IndieWire shares the exclusive trailer for the film below.
Where “And Then We Danced” centered on the romance between two young male dancers, the Swedish director’s latest bridges the gap between generations: Mzia Arabuli stars as Lia, a retired, world-weary schoolteacher on a journey from Batumi in Georgia to Istanbul in Turkey to find her missing trans niece Tekla, and Deniz Dumanli as Evrim, a trans NGO lawyer who looks like an Anna Magnani, and is someone the movie at first dupes us into thinking is Lia’s niece. Along for the ride with Lia is Lucas Kankava as Achi, a Georgian teenager who claims to know where Tekla lives, but is more driven by a sense of adventure and wanderlust.
From IndieWire’s review out of Berlin earlier this year: “As the feature both written and directed by Akin, his third, expands, it only become more impressively novelistic in scope, looking under unseen corners and pockets of Istanbul to celebrate its cast-asides or hideaways, from a community of spunky, spicy trans women living in what appears like a crumbling tenement on the outside but contains much private joy within, to the busking, bright-eyed children living on the city streets. The beginning of ‘Crossing’ finds Lia trudging herself along the sea to prepare for the journey from Batumi, where she links up with Achi, who claims to know the address of her niece Tekla.”
It continues, “How trustworthy Achi is emerges in blurrier dimensions, as it becomes clear the shit home life he’s trying to escape. The character of Achi is for certain meant to represent a particular generation of post-Soviet Georgians, while Lia is more bound to previously oppressive rule, a woman who subjugated herself to her profession and whose weary body and soul now embody that compromise.”
“Crossing” opens in U.S. theaters on Friday, July 19 before streaming globally on MUBI on Friday, August 30. Watch the exclusive trailer below.
