Film Screening : Crossing
Saturday March 1 @ 3pm
About a year ago I started to listen to the Turkish folk singer Selda Bağcan on a very heavy rotation. She is often referred to as “the bitter sound of Turkish people” due to the emotional quality of her vocals. I remember it matching the bittersweet mood that I was already settled into. When I watched Crossing for the first time, there was a scene in which the main character Lia (played by Mzia Arabuli) is walking through Istanbul alone, there’s a look in her face of deep nostalgia, as though she’s reliving memories from when she visited the city as a child; this scene is accompanied by Selda Bağcan in the soundtrack. There is a depth to this scene in which the narrative is ushered more by emotion than by words, while I watched it there was a resonance that reverberated throughout my entire body, like the Ottoman structures in which Lia walked her memory through.
Lia is a retired history teacher, her age and experience gives a hard shell that allows her to be steadfast and determined. After the passing of her sister she sets out on a journey to Istanbul to find her niece who became estranged from the family after she came out as a trans-woman. On this journey Lia befriends people who seemingly exist outside of her lived-experience, which begins to dissolve the hardness of her exterior. Crossing is a story about a journey, but it seems to transcend the tropes of finding oneself by finding someone else, finding someone who has been othered. And perhaps this is a journey towards finding forgiveness.
