“I have no future and thus no plans. I’m just here until I’m not.” Stony-faced and severe, Lia, a retired schoolteacher from Batumi, Georgia, is not in the business of mincing words. But she’s not being entirely honest about her plans. There is one final thing that she hopes to achieve: she aims to track down her niece, Tekla, to make amends for failing her years before in a time of need.

Her quest takes her across the border to Istanbul; tagging along with her is Achi, an opportunist kid who has talked his way on to her trip as an interpreter, but really just sees her as a way of escaping his dead-end life in a Black Sea beach shack with his bullying brother. Following a series of false starts, and a few too many evenings of heavy drinking, the pair connect with Evrim (Deniz Dumanli), a trans woman, lawyer and advocate for trans rights.

The haunting Turkish songs that underscore these episodes are similarly adaptable, plaintive in one moment and exultant the next. The greatest discoveries of all, though, may be among the cast, who are mostly unknowns and are uniformly outstanding. 

Crossing takes all of us down paths that even the shrewdly observant Lia would be unable to predict, but that she’d be the first to appreciate. ​It's a heartbreaker in all the best ways.