In 2013, Istanbul’s Taksim Gezi Park erupted into large-scale protest as demonstrations against proposed gentrification efforts escalated, following a police crackdown, into a full-blown uprising against what many students and young people saw as a pattern of overreach by the country’s ruling AKP party. Today one can still find police barricades stacked neatly around Taksim Square as a reminder of the lengths the authorities will go in their retaliation against dissent. Today the neighborhood surrounding the park, sitting at the head of Istanbul’s main retail drag, has since become a hot spot for real estate development while the AKP still sits comfortably in power. Not much has changed except for that which might benefit those who profit from the city’s endless skyward growth. It is in these side streets near Taksim Square that Levin Akin’s new film, Crossing, is set. The area has a storied history as a refuge for sex workers and members of the city’s LGBTQ+ community, many of which famously allowed protestors to use their apartments as safe houses during the protests. While 2013’s protests are not explicitly mentioned in the film, we can think of the story Akin tells as sitting in their long shadow. The wave of student protests signaled a sea change in Turkish governance, a trend towards heavier reliance on police aggression to enforce a conservative agenda, the brunt of which has come to fall on a queer community who remain legally unprotected from discrimination in housing and employment.
Our characters are an unlikely pair of Georgian nationals looking for a trans woman, Tekla, who is said to have disappeared into the sea of boarding houses and cheap hostels around Taksim Square. Tekla’s aunt, a retired schoolteacher named Ms. Lia, searches to fulfil her sister’s dying wish. She is joined, much to her chagrin, by a young man who claims to know Tekla’s whereabouts and whose elementary grasp of English (learned from YouTube) he claims will be of use. In truth, he is desperate to get away from his domineering older brother. Their journey follows many of the early beats of a road movie as they find themselves in over their heads in a strange city a country away from home. Once in Istanbul, Ms. Lia looks out onto the alleyways of the city through a stony mask that attempts to hide her confusion and disgust at the life she imagines her niece to have chosen. The young man, Achi, is only marginally helpful, sneaking out of their hotel room at night to ask restaurant managers for work. He sees Istanbul as a place where he can make a life for himself. Typical of the road movie, their journey is a catalyst for personal transformation.
The film’s plot, not content to simply focus on the search, expands outwards to include a view from within the community. We meet Evrim, Turkish for “evolution,” a trans legal activist working for an NGO that protects the city’s queer and trans community from predatory police officers and landlords. We watch her also strive against the medical bureaucracy to have her status legally changed to reflect her gender identity. Through her character we come to understand the struggle of a community hoping to be treated with legitimacy by those in power, but who are continuously pushed further to the margins by a society tracking towards religious conservatism. Evrim is our doorway to the larger community, where we are also treated to the story of two children living on the street, making a few spare lira by busking. Akin’s approach in plotting here is reminiscent of the broad tapestry woven by the social critic writers of the modern city, Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo.
Director Levin Akin is himself an outsider, a gay man born and raised in Sweden to Georgian parents who left their home country during Soviet rule. His previous film, And Then We Danced, set in the tense world of the National Georgian Ensemble dance team, was a darling of Cannes’ Director’s Fortnight in 2019. He turns in steady work here, with an eye for social statement filmmaking that nonetheless finds its beating heart at the level of individual character. Crossing is a film that begins reservedly but slowly reveals itself in its cumulative effect, as the ties that connect each node in the web of characters becomes apparent. The film undergoes, in this way, its own kind of transformation, from the kernel of a story about a missing person to the tale of a community attempting to manage its survival amid a society that would prefer to have them not exist at all.
Photo courtesy of MUBI
The post Crossing appeared first on Spectrum Culture.