In a black-and-white, 4:3 frame, a young woman with a cigarette is sitting on a sofa between her crying mother and her stone-faced father, and tells the camera how she hasn't left the house for 11 years. She is a trans woman named Adelina, and in rural Georgia, this not only brings shame upon the whole family, but also poses a potential threat to one’s life. This is one of the opening shots of Georgian filmmaker Rati Tsiteladze's first feature-length documentary, A Song Without Home, which has just world-premiered in the DOX:AWARD Competition at CPH:DOX and also scooped a Special Mention for the Mermaid Award at the Thessaloniki International Documentary Film Festival (see the news).

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Adelina runs away to Vienna, amidst support from her mother and curses from her father, who only speaks to the camera once – to angrily say that he doesn't want to talk about it. An aspiring dancer, with little knowledge of German, she is forced to do sex work, both online and in person. She has a friend, another Georgian trans woman, but what the film conveys most strikingly is her constant feeling of loneliness, displacement and uncertainty about her identity.

Tsiteladze, who both shot and edited the doc, often follows her with a handheld camera as she walks, runs or dances on empty nocturnal Vienna streets, accompanied by her voice-over telling of her memories, fears, doubts and hopes. The city's stately exteriors pointedly contrast with her fraught interior world. In the meantime, the mother is still at home and has separated from her violent husband, who was given a restraining order. She is in a terrible, nervous state, sleeping with a knife under her pillow, constantly crying and half-heartedly looking for professional help, which is not easy to come by. If we feel sympathy and compassion for Adelina, from her mother we only get immense sadness.

The film is as haunting as it is touching, as Tsiteladze goes for a varied but consistent, distinctly impressionistic, approach. The black-and-white cinematography is reserved for the early scenes in Georgia and some of Adelina's memories, while footage from the present day is intensely coloured. This goes especially for the dark, simultaneously melancholy and ominous scenes that discreetly show the protagonist's in-person sex work. She has red, green and purple bulbs that provide a little light within the deep shadows of her flat. Red is dominant, and she often wears lipstick and clothes of that colour. At times, the image doubles or trebles, with lights smeared and melting into each other. When she dances in front of a mirror, preparing for an audition, or when she is on the webcam with clients, the quality of the image is more sober, but the camera angles are skewed, with her being filmed from above or underneath. Because even in Vienna, she can't feel safe: a Georgian man gets on the call and threatens to kill her. “All I want is to feel like a human,” she says to a customer.

The music and sound by Marius Leftărache are meticulously designed and ever-present, playing a decisive role in how the director takes us through the story and the protagonists’ states of mind. There is an undefined, somewhat frenzied but unmistakeable religious aspect to the film, which also reflects the psychological and emotional precariousness of the two women – like when Tsiteladze cuts from Adelina crossing herself in front of the Stephanskirche, accompanied by Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake”, to her mother standing in the shadow of an ancient Georgian church.

A Song Without Home was produced by Georgia’s ArtWay Film.