The Crossing

Kyona tells her story of displacement, flight and the search for a new home in drawn and painted pictures. Together with her slightly younger brother Adriel and their parents, the 13-year-old girl has to leave her idyllic home village where both children spent a happy time. The village is attacked, and the family just manages to escape the foreign violence. But on the way, Kyona and Adriel are separated from their parents, and an odyssey across the country begins for both of them. As street children, they have to submit themselves to brutal gang laws in the nearby big city, they are sold by cynical bosses and kept as servants working in serfdom and living in a kind of gingerbread house of bizarre stinking rich surrogate parents. After temporary separation, they eventually find themselves in an odd travelling circus. Both of them leave their childhood behind, and the girl experiences the wonder of awakening love in a distorted way. In the end, they manage to escape from an internment camp, a flight which leads them across the border towards a questionable kind of freedom.