‘I saw In Bed with Madonna 50 times. I’d never seen guys kissing before’: Levan Akin on formative films, trans rights and usurping his heroes

To say that Levan Akin ’s experience of making his new film, Crossing , was more tranquil than his previous one, And Then We Danced , is a bit like observing that Manchester’s Canal Street has a more inclusive vibe than Moscow’s Red Square. Both movies are queer-themed: Crossing follows a retired teacher searching for her transgender niece in Istanbul; And Then We Danced concerns a Georgian ballet dancer inching out of the closet.

This time around, however, there were no death threats for Akin to deal with, no bodyguards required on set, no riot police called in to quell protests. Cultural figures have not denounced Crossing, as they did with its predecessor. (“There are no gay people in Georgian dance,” said Nino Sukhishvili of the Georgian National Ballet.) And there has been no need to pack cast members off to more tolerant parts of the world for their own protection. “It’s been quite nice,” says the bearded, 44-year-old film-maker, letting the note of understatement hang in the air.

When we first met five years ago, I felt like a parched explorer finding water in the desert. Akin was the fourth director I had interviewed about the difficulties of making queer films in homophobic countries, but only the first who turned out to be gay himself. “I am!” he said happily, speaking from his Stockholm apartment, a feline tail passing under his nose. “Why else do you think I’m living here with my cats?”

Meeting him now – at the London office of Crossing’s distributor, where he lounges on the sofa in a baseball cap – he is no less charming or droll. We discover almost immediately that we share a fanatical love of the documentary In Bed With Madonna , and soon Akin is babbling away excitably. “You know Sharon, Madonna’s makeup artist in the film? I dated a guy who was friends with her! Amazing, right? This was, like, 20 years ago, and he had so many crazy stories.” Then he starts parroting dialogue from the movie, and I realise I have been comprehensively out-fanboyed.

It was seeing In Bed With Madonna at the age of 10 that gave Akin, who was born in Sweden to Georgian parents, his earliest inklings about his sexuality. “I’d never seen guys kissing until that movie. I was appalled: ‘Eww, this is so nasty and dirty.’ All my little 10-year-old self-hate was coming through. Then I watched it, like, 50 times. I was fascinated.”

Perhaps his own films could have that impact on audiences. It’s one of the reasons he thinks so much about the effect of what he puts on screen. “We’re very inspired by what we see, so I wanted to show alternatives,” he says. “It helps people to see what’s possible. I like the idea of making the films that I wanted when I was growing up: hopeful, but not naive.” Crossing, with its tale of slow-dawning inter-generational tolerance, was inspired by a real-life story Akin heard about an older Georgian man whose granddaughter was transgender. “She had been ostracised by the whole family, and he used to come down from the village regularly to sit and drink tea and eat fruit with her. That was my way into Crossing.”

Despite its optimism, the film doesn’t gloss over the prejudice faced by trans people. As the missing woman’s aunt, Miss Lia (Mzia Arabuli), leaves Batumi to scour Istanbul with the help of Achi (Lucas Kankava), a young Jack-the-lad, and Evrim (Deniz Dumanli), a trans lawyer who works for the NGO Pink Life, Akin touches on commonplace injustices, such as the labyrinthine process of Evrim being granted her ID documents. “It’s such a bureaucratic mess,” he says. “I could have made a whole other film following her trying to get that ID. There are a lot of movies within this movie.” But as with his previous film, he subverts our most dismal expectations wherever possible. When a taxi driver calls out to Evrim from his vehicle, we fear the worst – until he turns out genuinely to desire her, rather than harassing her.

I’m making the films I wanted growing up – hopeful, but not naive

Crossing is a neorealist buddy movie with three heroes. Akin was looking to cast a woman with the seasoned gravitas of Anna Magnani from Pasolini’s Mamma Roma . Instead, he got two: Arabuli, the only professional actor among the leads, and Dumanli, who was cast as Evrim after responding to a social media ad, both evoke Magnani’s fearlessness and stoicism. Kankava’s only previous experience was making cheeky-chappie TikToks of himself; he sent Akin an audition tape shot in the nail salon where he worked. Together, they make an unlikely but plausible trio. “I love them,” Akin says. “They’re like a motley crew.”

The rest of Crossing is crammed with colourful supporting characters who evoke strong community networks and chosen families, whether it’s the urchins looking out for one another on the streets, or the neighbourhood of trans women to whom Lia turns for assistance. Some faces appear for a scene or two, then drift away. Take the Georgian businessman who buys dinner for Lia and Achi, only to vanish during a bout of street dancing. What happened to him?

“Yeah, where did he go?” says Akin, sounding for all the world as if he is an audience member and not the author of the script. “Istanbul is like an Advent calendar: you open the little windows, then close them and move on to the next window.” Long-lens cinematography conveys the blur and bustle of city life. “It was impossible to clear the streets so we had our own set of extras around the main actors, and we would hide in a balcony and film from far away. There was a lot of guerrilla stuff we did to capture that energy.”

Akin is now firmly established now as a gay director: And Then We Danced was named best feature at the 2019 LGBTQ+ Iris festival in Cardiff, and Crossing won the Teddy jury award at Berlin this year. But he took a while to reach that point. His first two features were the indie drama Certain People and an adaptation of the Swedish fantasy novel The Circle , co-produced by Benny from Abba. Then, in 2013, Akin saw reports on social media of a Tbilisi Pride parade under attack. “That was when I said, ‘Wait a minute. I’m Georgian and I’m from Sweden. I can do something.’ So I travelled to Georgia for research, without knowing it would become And Then We Danced. That gave me the creative spark: ‘This is what I want to do. This is how I should make films.’”

Before then, he had undergone an enviable training period at the studio of Roy Andersson , the idiosyncratic director who made the pastoral A Swedish Love Story before switching to the mordantly funny, absurdist tableaux of Songs from the Second Floor and You, the Living . “A Swedish Love Story captures a moment in time that doesn’t exist any more, before Sweden changed aesthetically with Ikea and everything became uniform and white,” says Akin. “I’d always loved Roy, so I rang the doorbell of his studio once a week to ask if I could intern, and finally someone said yes. There were only 20 people there, and everyone does everything. We built those environments in You, the Living by hand. We did the carpentry. Sometimes, I held the boom. It was such a fun place.”

Andersson, who is 81, announced his retirement after his 2019 film About Endlessness – which made it all the more awkward when Akin found himself competing with him that year in the Swedish Film Institute’s prestigious Guldbagge awards. Who won? “I did,” he says sheepishly. He must notice me wince, because then he says: “I know, right?”

And Then We Danced beat Andersson’s film in the best feature and best screenplay categories. “I really wanted him to win. I’m not saying that in a humble way. But he’s amazing. And I don’t know if he’s going to make another movie.” He wonders if we should stop talking about him now. “I don’t want to upset him.”

The turmoil and controversy surrounding And Then We Danced did at least reassert Akin’s belief in cinema. “It made me realise even more that film is important. It can change things, it has value. I don’t want to waste time making anything that doesn’t hold significance for me. If you’re going to put three or four years of your life into a movie, it should feel meaningful. Otherwise, what’s the point?”

• Crossing is in UK cinemas from 19 July and playing at the MUBI FEST. Akin is taking part in a Q&A after the screening on 12 July