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34th European Film Awards
Berlin

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CROSSING

CROSSING
Sweden, France, Denmark, Turkey, Georgia

SYNOPSIS

Lia, a retired teacher, made a promise to find her long-lost niece Tekla. The search takes her to Istanbul, a beautiful city that seems full of connections and possibilities. There she meets Evrim, a lawyer fighting for trans rights, and Tekla starts to feel closer than ever …

CREDITS

Written & directed by: Levan Akin
Produced by: Mathilde Dedye, Katja Adomeit, Anna Kharahadze, Nino Chichua, Ersan Çongar, Nadia Turincev, Omar El Kadi
Cinematography: Lisabi Fridell
Editing: Levan Akin, Emma Lagrelius
Production Design: Roger Rosenberg
Costume Design: Linn Eklund
Make-Up & Hair: Esma Keskin, Esra Arslan, Suat Inalhan, Madona Tchanturia
Sound: Anne Gry Friis Kristensen, Sigrid Jensen, Mustafa Bölükbaşı, Irakli Ivanishvili
Visual Effects: Erik Kobro Hals, Vincent Larsson, Jonas Ussing, Philippe Perrot, Jakob Witt
Casting: Pınar Çelik, Bulut Sezer, Eka Mjavanadze, Shoka Magradze, Leli Miminoshvili
Cast: Mzia Arabuli (Lia), Lucas Kankava (Achi), Deniz Dumanlı (Evrim)

STATEMENT OF THE DIRECTOR

With CROSSING I set out to make a film about solidarity and finding the small gestures of kindness and understanding between strangers and family alike. I also wanted to show rooms and places that are rarely explored in stories from the region.

The film is based on a true story I was told whilst researching AND THEN WE DANCED, about a grandmother traveling from Georgia to Turkey in search of her trans granddaughter. Just like with my previous film, making CROSSING was very challenging. The existence of LGBTQ+ people in Georgia and Turkey is under tremendous pressure, and Turkey’s president Erdogan ran most of his recent presidential campaign with anti-LGBTQ+ rhetorics.

In my film we follow retired schoolteacher Lia who is looking to fulfill her recently deceased sister’s dying wish – to find her lost trans daughter, Tekla. Together with a down on his luck young man, Achi, who claims to have Tekla’s address in Istanbul, she travels from Georgia to Turkey to find her niece. Lia and Achi are from different generations and as such don’t have much in common even though they live in the same country. There is a great divide of ideology in Georgia between the Soviet and the post-Soviet generation. Achi desperately wants to leave Georgia as he lives under the oppressive rule of his older brother, and he knows there is no future in Georgia for his young Western-oriented generation.

As the journey unravels, so does Lia. Through her relationship with Achi and her encounters with the trans community in Istanbul, specifically with Evrim (a trans woman who works as a lawyer for an NGO in Istanbul), Lia begins to open up and see the world and her place in it differently. All three main characters have made great sacrifices in limiting their lives and inhibitions in order to not upset the ruling hegemony.

I myself am Georgian born in Sweden (my ancestry is from Batumi), and I have ties to Turkey (both my parents were born there). The journey from Batumi in Georgia, along the Black Sea to Istanbul is a journey I have taken many times myself as a child. I am a mix of many cultures, traditions and norms and the themes of modernity versus tradition are very personal and something I have struggled with myself. I drew a lot from my own experiences, asking myself if my grandparents were living today, would they accept me for who I am? Probably not – but in showing these examples of acceptance I hope to inspire new ways forward.