When Levan Akin’s movie “And Then We Danced,” a romance between men in a Georgian folk-dance troupe, premiered at Cannes in 2019, it became a festival hit and later an Oscars submission. But when it screened in Georgia later that year, the movie’s combination of traditional Georgian culture and gay love sparked violent protests from conservative groups.
Akin’s latest film, “Crossing,” which opens in U.S. theaters Friday, also deals with L.G.B.T. themes, though the filmmaker said recently that he had hoped its reception in Georgia would be smoother. Its plot, about a woman who travels from Georgia to Turkey to search for her estranged trans niece, seemed unlikely be perceived as an attack Georgian culture in the same way, he said.
But this spring, when Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi, erupted in weeks of protests against a law on foreign influence that critics said would hamper Georgia’s chances of joining the European Union, Akin decided against releasing the movie there in such a polarized climate.
“There is such political turmoil,” Akin said, “and we don’t want the film to be used as fodder in the debate. I don’t want that to repeat.”
In “Crossing,” Lia (Mzia Arabuli), a retired and unmarried history teacher, travels to Istanbul from the city of Batumi, on Georgia’s Black Sea coast, searching for her niece Tekla, who has fled after her family rejected her. Lia is assisted in scouring the city’s narrow streets and packed rooming houses by Evrim (Deniz Dumanli), a trans rights activist and lawyer. They form an unlikely bond — but finding Tekla proves difficult.
L.G.B.T. visibility is a frequent flashpoint for tensions in Georgia, a socially conservative country in the Caucasus, strongly influenced by the Orthodox Church, that was part of the Soviet Union until 1991. While Tbilisi is home to some L.G.B.T.-friendly clubs and bars, many Georgians hold reactionary views about sexuality and gender. An attempt to stage a gay pride march in Tbilisi last year was aborted after hundreds of right-wing activists attacked the gathering.
In June, the governing Georgian Dream party stirred those divisions when it brought forward another contentious bill. The proposed law, which Parliament will vote on in the fall, is called “On Family Values and the Protection of Minors” and is accompanied by suggested amendments to 18 other laws. The legislative package includes bans on gender-affirming surgery and gender changes in legal documents; it also includes prohibitions on sharing information that “aims to popularize identifying with a gender different from one’s biological sex” and depictions of same-sex relationships.
Though the legislation is vaguely worded, the speaker of Georgia’s parliament, Shalva Papuashvili, told reporters on June 4 that the proposed bans on what he called L.G.B.T. “propaganda” would affect broadcasters and movie theaters, according to Open Caucasus Media, an independent news organization.
Many Georgian filmmakers were already complaining about what they see as government interference in their art. More than 450 movie industry professionals are boycotting the Georgian National Film Center, the government agency that supports film production, whose leadership, they say, has been stuffed with government stooges. In a statement, the agency said it could not discuss how the proposed anti-L.G.B.T. law would affect moviemaking in Georgia. “Since the text is currently a draft,” it said in a statement, “we believe it is not possible to comment on its impact.” Georgia’s culture ministry did not respond to several requests for comment.
Akin said that Georgia had become more polarized over L.G.B.T rights after a recent change of tack by the Georgian Dream government. The party adopted a more permissive attitude after taking office in 2012, when it aspired to lead the country into the European Union, but lately, it has taken on a repressive stance as it orients itself toward Russia.
“To see that things are going in this direction is frankly quite depressing,” Akin said. He added, however, that he remained optimistic. Filmmaking was a “form of therapy,” he said, and a reminder “that humans are also very capable of empathy and solidarity.”
Akin said he had worked collaboratively with trans members of the “Crossing” cast and crew, as well as an Istanbul-based trans support association, Pink Life, to create an authentic world in the movie.
“Part of the seed of ‘Crossing’ was that I met with trans women in Tbilisi who told me they would go a lot to Istanbul,” where they could “just disappear in the city,” Akin said. “There, even if some people looked at them in a bad way, it wasn’t people that knew them; they were anonymous.”
Dumanli, the actress who plays the trans-rights activist Evrim, said that positive trans roles were rare in movies from Turkey or its neighbors in the Caucasus. “Trans women are always portrayed in stories filled with sorrow, usually ending up with a murder,” she said. “‘Crossing,’” she added, was “more realistic. It shows these characters as normal people.”
Akin said his own position as a border-crossing outsider — he lives in Sweden, where he was raised by Turkish parents of Georgian heritage — made it easier to raise the funds he needed within Sweden and other countries to bring L.G.B.T. stories from Georgia to the screen.
But many artists without foreign connections are concerned that telling those stories could soon become tough. Taki Mumladze, a Georgian screenwriter, actress and theater director whose work explores sexual identity and desire, said she was concerned that the proposed anti-L.G.B.T. law would make self-reflection in her work “very difficult,” by forbidding her from discussing themes to her.
Mumladze co-wrote and starred in the 2022 movie “A Room of My Own,” a drama with a lesbian sex scene that impressed critics on the festival circuit. This month in Tbilisi, she staged her play “Nino: My Aphrodite,” a two-hander about the social barriers to love between two women of a different generation and class.
On the play’s closing night, Mumladze addressed the audience after the curtain call to condemn the proposed legislation as a threat to free expression. Whether the audience liked her play was irrelevant, she said — her character’s voices had a right to be heard onstage.
“When ‘A Room Of My Own’ premiered in Georgia, strangers wrote to me a lot about coming out,” she said later in an interview, “so I feel how important it is to speak about such topics.”
“If we look at history, people always found some way to express themselves. But why should I not be free?,” she said. “I will fight, because there is no way to live with this. A lot of people worked very hard for us to be where we are — and why does our government want to take us back to the Soviet Union?”
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