\u201cIstanbul is a place\u2026where people come to disappear.\u201d This is the sad conclusion arrived at by late in this moving film by one of its principal characters, Lia, a stern-faced older woman who has crossed over into the Turkish capital from the Black Sea\u2019s Batumi, a desolate-looking spot in Georgia. A retired school teacher, she has left her home after making a promise to her now-dead sister. The promise was to find that woman\u2019s child, who\u2019s living in Turkey. All Lia has to go on is a name, and the fact that the now-adult child is transgender.<\/p>\n
The movie, written and directed by Levan Akin, begins in the messy, tumultuous house where Achi, a young man who\u2019s for all intents and purposes still a boy, lives miserably under the thumb of his older brother. Lia happens by the house, is recognized by one of its residents, and on the spot Achi concocts a tale, saying he knows the niece, Tekla, and has an address for her. He attaches himself to Lia, who accepts his company reluctantly, and soon they\u2019re off, settling awkwardly in cheap lodgings and combing the poorer areas of Istanbul with not much to go on but hope. <\/p>\n
The two actors who play Lia and Achi, Mzia Arabuli and Lucas Kankava, are marvels. Kankava has a wide-open face that registers Achi\u2019s boundless naivete, which is always there no matter how cocky or obdurate he makes himself. Arabuli\u2019s own expression as Lia is often pinched, but as time wears on her, and as she starts to let herself go in a \u201cwhat the hell\u201d sort of way \u2014 she likes to dip into a bottle of a fermented drink called \u201cchacha,\u201d a habit she initially tries to hide from Achi \u2014 a pained vulnerability makes itself felt. These are two lost souls who make an unlikely temporary fishbowl for themselves, far from homes they may never return to. <\/p>\n
On one of their ferry rides, Akin\u2019s camera makes a graceful camera move away from the anxious Lia and Achi and settles on the more content-in-the-moment face of a trans woman, whose story the movie then picks up. This is not, as is soon made clear, Tekla. The character\u2019s name is Evrim, and she\u2019s a woman who\u2019s found a purpose. Near to completing a law degree, she works for a trans rights NGO that also looks into various cases in poorer neighborhoods; at one point we see her springing a young boy and his younger sister, who act on the peripheries of the movie\u2019s central story threads, from jail. She\u2019s confident and compassionate, enjoys a fairly robust sex life, but she\u2019s subject to condescension \u2014 at best \u2014 from the various authority figures she\u2019s obliged to deal with. Deniz Dumanli\u2019s portrayal of the character is extraordinary, grounded, vanity-free. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cIstanbul is a place\u2026where people come to disappear.\u201d This is the sad conclusion arrived at by late in this moving film by one of its principal characters, Lia, a stern-faced older woman who has crossed over into the Turkish capital from the Black Sea\u2019s Batumi, a desolate-looking spot in Georgia. A retired school teacher, she …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[45],"class_list":["post-1446","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-drama-movies","tag-drama"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1446","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1446"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1446\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1446"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1446"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1446"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}