Crossing (2024)

[aghst]

Found out about this movie from some top 10 movies of 2024 lists.

It's about a part of the world and culture probably not well-known to Americans or maybe even some Western Europeans.

Lia, a retired teacher, toys to make good on a promise that she made to her dying sister, to find the sister's daughter Tekla, or Lia's niece.

She first goes to a poorer part of Batumi, GA, because Tekla is a trans girl who apparently was a sex worker.  There she meets one of her former students and his younger brother Achi.

The former student doesn't know Tekla but Achi, who is still a teen, claims he knows where she moved to in Istanbul and offers to go with her.  Truth is, Achi is in a dead end and wants to get away from his older brother.

Lia is wary but agrees.  They go around to a part of town where there are many sex workers on the streets, some of them trans.  But they have no luck finding Tekla.

What's interesting is that neither Lia nor Achi can speak Turkish fluently.  Achi claims to know a few phrases.  But in fact, they have to communicate with Turks, their neighbors, in English, which Achi has a better command of than Turkish.

Achi starts asking if there are jobs for him.  Then he happens to go to a party and meets Evrim, a trans activist who has a legal education, just waiting to get her degree.  She works for an NGO which advocates for sex workers, arbitrates disputes they may have with landlords and such.

Evrim knows the struggles of being trans -- she has plenty of men interested in her for sex but not to take her out on dates in the public.  She asks around and finds a brothel where the madam believes Tekla may have just been overwhelmed with drug addiction.

Lia weeps over the few belongings of Tekla she's able to retrieve.

Achi isn't going back to Georgia.  He's going to try to find a place in the big city.  The movie wonderfully depicts the real bond which a middle-aged Lia and a teen male Achi form, without sentimentality.  Theirs is a bond formed from their common experience, trying to find someone, make their way in a big, foreign city.

There's a dream sequence in which Lia finds Tekla, is reunited with her.   The scene allows Lia to verbalize what's been hinted all along, that Tekla's mother rejected her because she was Trans and Lia didn't do enough to intervene, that Lia as well as her sister failed Tekla.  Lia says another man in a nearby village shot his own daughter for coming out as trans, claimed it was an accident.

But it's a conservative culture whereas in Istanbul, there's a little more tolerance.

The movie doesn't try to preach tolerance of trans.  It works on the level of an older woman trying to fix or redress something that she regrets, yearning to reunite with maybe the only family she thought she had left.

It mainly shows the humanity and compassion of all the characters, generosity shown repeatedly by members of an underclass -- sex workers -- who've not been treated well or have been discriminated against.

It's unbelievably positive about human nature, shows people being kind under the most unlikely circumstances.

That is why it feels so alien to American viewers.