Four years ago, during a visit to a neighborhood beauty parlour, I encountered a rooster with its legs tied, resting its head on a broken foot bath bucket. The striking image prompted me to ask a beautician about him, and I learned he was to be offered at Edappally church for St. George. This moment inspired me to begin writing Victoria.
From that day on, each visit to a beauty parlour became an ethnographic field trip, where I observed women, their emotions, and their stories. Creating a film with government funding allows one artistic freedom without the pressure of commercial success. I embraced this opportunity in my creative choices, casting new faces from Angamaly and Chalakudy, where the film's dialect is spoken, and building a beauty parlour set from scratch. We have employed long takes and sustained some shots that defy conventional narrative structure. While remaining largely within the fictional framework, we aimed to incorporate a documentary style of looking, blurring the lines between fiction and reality.