🎞️ Crossing
I watched Crossings because it happened to be the mubi go film of the week two weeks in a row (because no where near me is showing I Watched the TV Glow yet).
It's a bittersweet culture clash drama - Georgian aunt Lia travels to Instanbul searching for her trans niece, whom she hopes to reconcile with.
It's an apt name for the film, which features a lot of incidental meetings and coincidences, and I kept thinking it was going to be too cute and wrap things up in a little bow - but, maybe because I wasn't expecting it, it subverted my expectations twice.
It's also a beautiful film. I've never visited Istanbul, or Türkiye, but it looked so full of life and possibilities - the film explores how people visit to reinvent themselves - but also to disappear.
I appreciated how even though Lia and her travelling companion are the main characters, and it spends time both on her life as an older woman mourning her youth, and her guilt over not being able to do better for her niece, we also spend time with the trans women of Istanbul, particularly Evrim and her struggles to become legally recognised as a woman and qualified as a lawyer, and the difficulties and joys of their lives. It's great to see these overlooked lives of women on screen.
The sting in the tail of this film is how sometimes it's not possible to make amends or fix your mistakes, however much you try and yearn to - but life can still be beautiful and in the trying, you can make connections you never expected.
Another one I'd recommend if you can catch it.