“There was a phase when I accepted that our movie, Victoria, might not be an entry at any international festival, get a limited release in Kerala, and that would be it for the movie,” says filmmaker Sivaranjini J. However, the director is now thrilled that her debut film has emerged as the sole entry from India to the Shanghai International Film Festival 2025, on from right this moment until June 22. The movie can be screened in the Asian New Talent class.
The movie is about Victoria (Meenakshi Jayan), a younger beautician from Angamaly in Ernakulam district of Kerala, who’s forcibly entrusted a sacrificial rooster as she heads for work. She, nonetheless, has different plans. She was plotting to elope along with her Hindu boyfriend after her Catholic mother and father come to find out about their relationship. Victoria oscillates between sustaining her composure at work and breaking down owing to her relationship troubles. The rooster’s antics at the magnificence parlour stuffed with girls provides to the chaos.
The makings of Victoria
“I had this idea when I went to a beauty parlour in my town. There was a rooster at the parlour, intended as an offering by one of the employees to St George Forane Church at Edappally [in Kochi] for the annual church festival. I got a spark for the script here. The image of a rooster in a parlour with only women was interesting,” says Sivaranjini, who’s from Manjapra, a number of kilometres away from Angamaly. “A lot of people from our part of the town attend this ritual. People offer a rooster to Saint George, especially when they see snakes in their vicinity seeing it a reminder from the saint,” explains Sivaranjini, pointing to a leitmotif in the film.
Sivaranjini J
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However, Sivaranjini solely received round to Victoria’s script later; when it was permitted by the Kerala State Film Development Corporation (KSFDC) for the Woman Empowerment Grant. “While it took a year to finish the approval process, I completed the script in two weeks,” says Sivaranjini. The workforce obtained funding from KSFDC in 2023 and had its premiere at the twenty ninth International Film Festival of Kerala in 2024, the place it gained the FIPRESCI award for the finest Malayalam movie by a debut director.
The movie boasts an nearly all-female solid, delving into points together with however not restricted to gender. “I wanted new faces who could speak in the Angamaly dialect. I like working with new actors as they would not have been typecast and it is fun to work with them. We found Meenakshi, Sreeshma Chandran, Steeja Mary, and Darsana Vikas through auditions. I had Jolly (Chirayath) chechi in my mind when I was writing the character of the middle-aged woman,” says Sivaranjini.
A nonetheless from Victoria
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“Meenakshi worked at a parlour to prepare for her role,” provides the director about the newcomer who has delivered a convincing efficiency as a cheerful younger girl, secretly burdened by her household and associate, seamlessly transitioning between the two moods. She gained the Best Performance award at the Independent and Experimental Film Festival of Kerala 2025 for her portrayal.
Meenakshi Jayan in Victoria
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The change in protagonist’s psyche is portrayed by way of gentle — its absence and temperature — consistently fluctuating between vibrant, heat frames and chilly, darkish frames. “When you are limited to one space, you can only play around with elements like light. I wanted to show that she is someone who hides her emotions very well and when she is alone, she shows her true self.” Set in the women-dominated area of a magnificence parlour, girls are portrayed as being free.
Existing disparities
Victoria additionally raises questions on caste and class disparities nonetheless prevalent in society. “I wanted to address caste because we live in a society where this exists and I couldn’t avoid it from the scope of the film. It was inspired by the experiences of my friends who are in interfaith marriages. The first question others ask them is ‘What is your partner’s caste?’”
Myths and faiths
What did the rooster with its legs tied signify? The director says, “For me, it is a spiritual presence. The central figure has a spiritual moment in the beginning when she touches the rooster for the first time. You also see her pick up a card from a box of Bible verses. On that day, the rooster becomes a source of spiritual support which helps her get through that day, to get out of the central conflict in the movie.”
Filmmaker Sivaranjini J
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The 33-year-old says that since she needed to accurately signify the delusion about the saint and the ritual, visuals from the actual pageant have been used. “It is like a found footage sequence. It was a document about an event which couldn’t be replaced. People may be familiar with sacrificing roosters in a Hindu context, but a lot of people are not aware of it in the Christian context. I wanted them to see that,” she says.
The beginnings
Sivaranjini, an engineering graduate, developed an affinity in the direction of motion pictures as a baby. “My father was part of a film society in Angamaly, and I used to watch a lot of films early on. However, after Class 12, I could not convince my parents to let me join a visual communication or mass communication course.” She studied movie and video communication at the National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad, and made two brief movies, Ritham (2016) and Kalyani (2014). She joined the PhD programme at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, after a two-year stint as an editor.
“When I began, I wanted to bring in the people I have known for years to my crew. All of them were my friends for years — my DOP (Anand Ravi), music director (Abhaydev Praful), people handling the sound and so on. I wanted it to be their debut as well,” says Sivaranjini.
Currently, in a rush to complete her doctoral thesis, Sivaranjini says, “As a filmmaker, I want to work with the movie medium and its form and as a woman, I want to continue to make movies with a lot of women in them, to present them in roles we have never seen them in.”
Published – June 13, 2025 03:35 pm IST
