Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Istanbul is a place where people disappear — so it is said in the panoramic human drama Crossing. And yet the film also makes a cogent case for the city as somewhere people also step into the light, sharpening into vivid focus. The director is Swedish filmmaker Levan Akin (And Then We Danced), who also maintains close links to his parents’ home country of Georgia. That is where we begin. A provincial coastal town is the setting for what seems a stifling drama about two parents and their sullen, bored teenage son. But not so fast. An older local woman soon appears outside the window. With her arrival, the story changes tack as quickly as life can. The boy is the roguish Achi (Lucas Kankava); the woman Lia (Mzia Arabuli), an ex-school teacher of stern bearing and sober mission. She is in town to search for her niece, a trans woman who’s gone missing. With Achi aware she may be in Istanbul, the pair set out to find her, the younger man pitching himself as a guide in order to escape his dead-end home.If the pair seem an odd couple to start with, they stay that way well into the story. But then Akin finds odd couples everywhere. Turkey and Georgia may share a border, but here they are neighbours united by incomprehension. When citizens of each country meet in the Turkish capital, they end up speaking English; neither knows the other’s language. And all manner of lives collide amid the churn and tumble of the city.Crossing never abandons the detective story it first promises to be. It is also true that you never quite know where this wry and empathetic film is heading. But that central search, and even the morphing relationship between Lia and Achi, is only one aspect of a movie that deepens and widens until the last moment, with other characters given a share of the story, and generosity of spirit in every scene. Another film would make this Istanbul of sex workers and street kids the stage for something brutal and didactic. Akin gives even the shabbiest address the hint of a picture book, and matches every sadness with optimism.★★★★☆In UK and US cinemas from July 19
