VICTORIAS by Telle | Germany | 2026 

Duration: 00:07:15

“VICTORIAS” is a retro-surreal comedy following a glamorous 1950s woman whose perfectly styled life spirals into bizarre scenes—chemical factories, TV stages, mutant insects, and atomic dinner parties—all while she smiles behind her iconic sunglasses.

DIRECTOR, WRITER, EDITOR : Telle
Images were created with the help of AI, no AI was used in the editing process.

CONTACTS / LINKS : https://kalkatak.de https://iiiil.ai/profile/telle.kalkattak https://4me4you.org/artist-telle-kalkattak  @telle.kalkattak 

In a surreal, reimagined 1950s, Victoria—a series of seemingly identical, chic women in floral dresses and dark sunglasses—navigates a world where the domestic and the cosmic collide. The film opens with mundane acts of service and consumption, but reality quickly fractures. Giant insects roam manicured suburban lawns, and UFOs hover over fields of vintage televisions, yet the Victorias remain unphased, maintaining their poised, “better living through chemistry” smiles.

As the narrative shifts, the boundaries of physics and nature dissolve further. Victorias work in retro-futuristic labs and switchboards, their movements synchronized and mechanical. They dine while nuclear clouds bloom on the horizon, treating global catastrophes as mere backdrop for a dinner party. The world becomes increasingly fluid: trains flood with seawater where cats float effortlessly, and gravity becomes optional as groups of women leap across the sky above vintage diners.

Underneath the bright, Technicolor aesthetic lies a biting satire of mid-century idealism. Whether they are being chased by monstrous beetles or crowned “Miss Atomic Energy” amidst mushroom clouds, the Victorias represent a chillingly persistent conformity. The film is a hallucinatory journey through a dreamscape of 1950s Americana, where the apocalypse is just another accessory to a perfectly styled outfit.

Combining whimsical choreography with high-stakes sci-fi imagery, Victorias explores the tension between suburban bliss and existential dread. It’s a world where the bizarre is ordinary, and the only constant is the relentless, polished grace of the women at its center.

Director’s statement
With Victorias, my goal was to construct a fever dream of mid-century Americana, where the polished veneer of the 1950s is peeled back to reveal a landscape of beautiful, synchronized chaos. I wanted to explore the “Atomic Age” not as a historical period, but as a psychological state—one defined by a paradoxical mix of suburban complacency and existential terror.

The visual language of the film relies on the tension between the mundane and the monstrous. By placing giant insects on manicured lawns and nuclear explosions behind dinner parties, I aim to satirize the era’s obsession with “Better Living Through Chemistry” and its relentless pursuit of a plastic perfection. The Victorias themselves are the ultimate embodiment of this; they are interchangeable, unflappable, and chillingly poised, even as gravity fails and the world floods.

Technically, this project was an exploration of AI as a surrealist tool. The dream-logic of the medium—its ability to fluidly morph environments and defy physics—was essential in capturing the “otherworldliness” I envisioned. Victorias is an invitation to look through those dark sunglasses into a world where the apocalypse is just another backdrop for a perfectly curated life. It is a celebration of the bizarre, a critique of conformity, and a testament to the strange beauty found when the familiar completely breaks down.

Bio
Telle (Estelle Cortet) traces the evolution of image-making from the flicker of MiniDV to the unpredictability of generative AI. With a background spanning media sciences and software development, she approaches technology as a collaborator, exploring the glitches, biases, and surrealism that emerge when machine logic meets human irrationality.

A long-time collaborator within the group Kalkattak, her recent transition into generative video has resulted in internationally screened short films and immersive installations. Her work exists at the intersection of technical precision and absurdist experimentation, creating “nonsense with intent”—brief transmissions of retro-nonsense from a world that feels simultaneously alien and uncomfortably familiar.

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