“My life is a prison”, Adelina says. The young woman is smoking and looking into the camera, her parents sitting on the sofa to her right and left. In black and white and the narrow 4:3 ratio, this family scene feels oppressive: Adeline spent eleven years under house arrest here, with a father who refuses to accept her identity and a mother who seems loving but powerless. In Georgia, there is neither freedom nor security for trans persons like Adelina. Anti-queer attacks happen in broad daylight; the legal situation of the LGBTQ community has recently deteriorated further. When the protagonist at last leaves her parents’ village to go to Vienna, the style of Rati Tsiteladze’s debut film also changes. The lipstick glows red, the lights of the big city neon yellow. A different, freer life seems possible. But the freedom brings new challenges: financial and health problems, communicating in a foreign language – and loneliness. “A Song Without Home” is the intimate, impressionistic long-term portrait of a person who wants to define herself and clings to an unshakeable conviction: “No law can erase who we are.”

Jan-Philipp Kohlmann