A Film Built on Trust

The first thing that struck me about the story was how implausibly modern it sounded. A filmmaker in India obsessively listening to an obscure dream-pop track from Los Angeles. An actor with ten million Instagram followers casually asking the internet if anyone recognised the song in his post. A comment beneath it. A reply. Then, within forty-five days, a film was born.

Most films begin with financing decks and market calculations. I’m Not An Actor began with taste. Aditya Kripalani, the film’s director, had been listening to Desire by Ruby Haunt on loop for days. Around the same time, actor Nawazuddin Siddiqui uploaded an Instagram post with the same song in the background and asked if anyone knew its name. Kripalani replied.

What followed still feels improbable in an industry built on hierarchy. Nawaz responded personally. “It’s a very rare song,” he wrote. “If you like this song, it means something special. We have the same taste.”

That exchange became the beginning of a film in which mutual recognition mattered more than transaction. Nawaz agreed to act without taking a fee.

The film asks a distinctly pandemic-era question: what does it mean to know someone entirely through a screen? During the lockdown years, millions discovered that intimacy could survive digitisation, though in altered form.

Kripalani turned that experience into narrative architecture. The film unfolds over a single day and almost entirely through one video call between two strangers. Mouni, a struggling actor in Mumbai, is played by Chitrangada Satarupa. Adnan, a recently retired banker in Frankfurt drifting quietly into depression, is played by Nawazuddin. She is meant to teach him acting. Gradually, they begin teaching each other how to confront themselves.

The Frankfurt setting emerged naturally from the filmmakers’ own lives. Kripalani divides his time between Germany and India, while his wife and producing partner, Sweta Chhabria, has spent over two decades working as a banker in Frankfurt.

But what fascinated me most was the operational madness required to execute it honestly. Indian cinema has simulated long-distance communication for decades through edits and performance tricks. I’m Not An Actor chose the harder path. Both actors remained on real video calls throughout filming. Both crews shot simultaneously in Frankfurt and Mumbai.

The logistical constraints bordered on the absurd. Frankfurt and Mumbai are separated by four-and-a-half hours. That left barely four overlapping daylight hours each day. Once evening arrived in either city, shooting stopped.

The actors stayed on iPhones throughout because the film itself exists within the visual grammar of a video call. Kripalani directed remotely through FaceTime while monitoring both crews on separate iPads, moving psychologically rather than geographically towards whichever actor needed him most.

The contrast between the two cities became an unintended commentary on filmmaking cultures. In Frankfurt, a single train sequence required booking an entire carriage because German privacy laws prohibited strangers’ faces from appearing even incidentally. Mumbai functioned according to opposite principles. The crew shot guerrilla-style in commuter trains using a Sony A7S3 rigged to resemble a vlog camera. In Mumbai, a film unit attracts crowds and usually results in shooting paralysis.

Then, there was the weather. One day, the Mumbai camera operator fainted from the heat. The same day in Frankfurt, Nawaz struggled to pronounce lines because the cold had numbed his tongue. This, for an actor celebrated precisely for his diction.

The film was edited remotely over FaceTime from Frankfurt, often seven hours a day. Its mediated and distant form, dependent on connection stability and trust, persisted through the entire process.

There was no studio cushioning any of this. Independent cinema remains an exercise in collective belief. Nawaz’s decision to waive his fee became the film’s moral centre.

After a screening to a German focus group watching with subtitles and no context, the filmmakers realised the ending failed emotionally. Kripalani re-shot it. Independent cinema rarely advances through certainty.

But now, at last, the gamble appears to be paying off. The film premiered at Cinequest in 2025. Nawaz won Best Actor at the New York Indian Film Festival. Chitrangada Satarupa won Best Actress at the DC South Asian Film Festival, where Kripalani also received a jury mention for Best Director. The most symbolic moment came later at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute, cradle of American method acting, when the film was screened there for students inheriting the tradition of Marlon Brando.

I came to this project late, as a small investor and co-producer through a friendship stretching back over a decade. I joined because I wanted proximity to the mechanics of filmmaking and not its glamour. Watching this film come together, I realised that sometimes cinema is assembled simply from the willingness of the right people to answer a message from a stranger, and then keep showing up afterwards.

(The writer works in tech and product management in Berlin. He is a co-producer on I’m Not An Actor.)