A cry for help reaches filmmaker Rati Tsiteladze one day in 2017. It comes from Adelina, a young trans woman who has been locked up in her parents' home in a Georgian village for the past eleven years.
In Austria, which Adelina chooses as a place of refuge, she is left to fend for herself in an indifferent and sometimes hostile new society. The only person she keeps in contact with in Georgia is her mother, who also wants to escape—from her resentful, aggressive husband and from the suffocating social conventions that govern her life.
Tsiteladze captures Adelina’s years-long struggle in poetic, impressionistic scenes, sometimes as majestic and evocative as composer Marius Leftărache’s music. This creates a painfully honest, moving, visceral, and intimate portrait. We see a daughter who wants to spread her wings but repeatedly encounters a cruel reality, a mother who draws strength from her daughter’s perseverance, and the complex and loving relationship between the two.
