4 ideas
In 1990s post-Soviet Tbilisi, eighteen-year-old Lela has aged out of a boarding school for children labelled intellectually disabled, but she stays on because she has nowhere else to go. When an American couple visits to adopt a child, she maneuvers to get them to choose Irakli, a younger boy she protects. Her plan is to get one child out of the institution, since she cannot get out herself.
Many of the children in the school are not intellectually disabled. They are poor, abandoned or inconvenient. The diagnosis is an administrative way of disposing of them. Once applied, the label sets how they are schooled, treated and seen, so the neglect it justifies produces the limitations that seem to confirm it.
A person trapped by circumstance can channel their own thwarted escape into rescuing someone else. Lela's fierce care for Irakli works as a surrogate exit: his getting out stands in for the future she was denied. Through this lens, some altruism reads as displaced survival, and its intensity measures what the rescuer lost.
When a state and its economy collapse, as Georgia's did after independence, institutions keep their buildings but lose the adults and resources that ran them. Custodial duties fall onto the residents themselves, so older children end up parenting, disciplining and defending younger ones.