There is a moment, early in Samreen Farooqui’s quietly devastating documentary The Ordinary Star, where the machinery of cinema is laid bare not as glamour but as a kind of borrowing. Nawazuddin Siddiqui, already a celebrated actor, is asked to study a man named Ashok - the actual resident of the room the actor will occupy while preparing for his role in Dibakar Banerjee’s short film within the 2013 anthology Bombay Talkies. What follows is not a behind-the-scenes lark but a slow, uncomfortable meditation on what it costs to turn a life into a performance. The film, which released on October 29, 2026, runs a lean 65 minutes, and every one of them is spent asking who gets to be ordinary and who gets to be a star.
Farooqui, working in Hindi within the Bollywood documentary space, constructs her film as a layering of fictions. There is Banerjee, the fiction director, orchestrating the creation of Porandar Vithal, the lead character of his Bombay Talkies segment. There are the documentary filmmakers, cameras rolling, capturing the construction itself. And there is Siddiqui, the actor, moving through the room, the streets, the small rituals of Ashok’s daily existence, absorbing a life that is not his own. Ashok, meanwhile, feeds this construction through his own lived experience - his habits, his anxieties, his particular way of occupying space. The result is a strange triangle: the fiction director, the documentary filmmakers, and the actor, all bit by bit, assembling a man who will exist only on screen, while the man who inspired him watches from the margins.
What makes The Ordinary Star so resonant is its refusal to treat this process as benign. The film ponders the invasiveness of the cinematic process, its need to devour so that it can create. There is an endless search here - a search to live a life less ordinary, yes, but also a search for authenticity that cinema can never fully satisfy. Banerjee and Siddiqui are credited as cast members, essentially playing versions of themselves, and that blurring is the point. The documentary does not pretend to be objective. It is complicit, and it knows it.
The timing of the release feels pointed, arriving more than a decade after Bombay Talkies first brought its four-director anthology to Indian screens. That film was a tribute to Hindi cinema’s centenary, a celebration of the form. The Ordinary Star, by contrast, is a reckoning with the form’s appetite. Farooqui’s camera lingers on the unglamorous textures of Ashok’s world - the room, the routines, the small dignities - and in doing so, it asks whether the act of observation is itself a kind of theft. Siddiqui, for his part, is fascinating to watch, not as a performer delivering lines but as a craftsman at work, studying, mimicking, and then inevitably transforming. The genius of his process is inseparable from the erasure of the man he is studying. That tension is never resolved, and Farooqui does not try to resolve it.
At 65 minutes, the film moves with the patience of a short story rather than the sweep of a novel. It does not offer easy conclusions. There is no triumphant premiere, no neat bow. Instead, there is the quiet aftermath of creation - the sense that a life has been borrowed, reshaped, and returned slightly altered. The documentary’s title carries its own irony: the ordinary star is both Ashok, the man whose ordinariness made him a subject, and Siddiqui, the star who must perform ordinariness to be believed. Neither fully belongs to the other, and the film sits in that gap.
For Hindi cinema audiences accustomed to documentaries that celebrate the craft, The Ordinary Star arrives as a more unsettling proposition. It is a film about the process of making films that refuses to flatter the process. It asks what happens to the people whose lives become raw material, and it offers no reassuring answer. What it offers instead is a portrait of a creative act as an act of consumption, rendered with precision and a deep, uncomfortable empathy. In a year crowded with loud spectacles, this is a film that whispers - and lingers.
