I want to tell you about a movie I just watched. “Crossing,” directed by Levan Akin and released this year, just left me a blubbering mess. This movie is why I watch movies.
This year has been a kind of reawakening for me. I have rediscovered my love of movies after being away for a few years. For more than a decade, watching movies was part of my job and I averaged around 500 a year. That is a lot of movies. For me, that was too many movies. I took a break. I don’t mean that I stopped watching movies altogether, but really it was next to nothing. Well, okay, for at least a couple of years after 2018, I don’t think I watched a single film. I simply couldn’t care anymore. My ability to connect with the screen was worn out, broken, kaput.
That has been slowly changing over the past couple of years. I can’t say where it started or if there was one movie that re-lit that pilot light, it just sort of crept up on me. Perhaps it was stumbling across the Kanopy app, free from my public library, and its eclectic catalogue of older and foreign films. Perhaps it was my work-life balance lightening up allowing me more free evenings to go to our local Art house cinema – shout out to the Metro in Edmonton.
But back to “Crossing.” It is the story of Lia, a retired history teacher in Georgia who travels to Istanbul with Achi, the young half-brother of a former student. Her sister’s dying wish was that Lia find her trans daughter who had fled to Turkey years ago. While Lia is trying to find her niece, Achi is trying desperately to find a place, any place, for himself in this world.
This is a graceful and patient film. The camera is gentle but not naive. It shows the smaller beauty of Istanbul, the streets, the people, the celebrations and the challenges. It doesn’t shy away from some of the seedier aspects of its world, but neither does it linger. And the ending, hoo boy. The title of this post is one of the gut punches waiting for you.
That’s all the setup you need. Go watch the film. If you can’t find it in the theatre, and you likely won’t, it is streaming on MUBI. Which you should check out regardless. It is my new favourite streaming service I think.
The link to the Letterboxd page for “Crossing is below. And while we’re on the subject, if you use Letterboxd, you should friend me. My username is, of course, LunaticEngine.
Until next time!
Paul Pearson 
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