The cinema Alfred Talkies is located in the middle of Mumbai in an old colonial style house. Large-format painted posters and an expansive auditorium with countless ceiling fans lure the audience inside, past the uniformed security guard, where they find distraction from everyday life with action movies. Original Copy shows the cinema and its staff as a family-like ensemble with a strict division of labour. The film focuses mostly on the chain-smoking poster painter Sheikh Rahman: as a mixture of trickster and old master, he commands his assistants, gives life tips and tells jokes, while a painting slowly emerges before our eyes and the Bollywood soundtracks thunder in the background.

Florian Heinzen-Ziob made his first feature-length documentary with Original Copy, which celebrated its world premiere at the Hot Docs Film Festival in 2015 and was shown at the Rotterdam International Film Festival. His short film For Your Own Safety celebrated its world premiere in 2016 at the Tribeca Film Festival and his second full-length documentary film German Class in 2018 at the Sheffield Docs Film Festival. He is co-owner of the independent production company Polyphem.

Georg Heinzen studied German studies and History at the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf and Film Dramaturgy at the HFF in Munich. As a freelance author, he writes screenplays for cinema and television, novels and plays. In 2011 he lived in Mumbai as Artist in Residence of the Kunststiftung NRW. There he took on teaching assignments for the Whistling Woods Filmschool Mumbai and the Film and Television Institute of India in Puna. He is co-owner of the independent production company Polyphem.