Development {{quotebox
Sabiha Sumar first thought of making a documentary on the changing sociocultural scenarios in Pakistan and India in 2013 as she wanted to "explore both countries and catch what is going on [
sic]". She was particularly intrigued by the
religious extremism in the sub continent and its impact on the public mindset. Sumar felt that a documentary was the best medium for tackling the subject as it "needed real people talking about real life experiences"; according to her, a fictionalised account of things would not have been as powerful as the real life accounts. The idea did not materialise until 2015, when it was selected for the
European Broadcasting Union's Eurovision Documentary Group Meeting. With the backing of the commissioning editors and professionals from the Union, Sumar was able to find investors for the project: the French-German networks
Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen and
Arte, and the
Danish Broadcasting Corporation. . Sumar met
Kalki Koechlin at the 2015
Mumbai Film Festival, where she was serving as the member of jury. She was looking for someone to collaborate with and felt that Koechlin "shared a similar level of curiosity". Sumar felt that it would be interesting to have for someone from India visit and explore Pakistan. Koechlin, for her part, was initially sceptic about the project as she felt that a journalist or research scholar would better suffice the demands of the documentary. It was only when a large part of the film's Pakistan segment was filmed that Sumar formally announced the project through an interview with the
Mumbai Mirror; she also discussed the problems of funding the production and asked people to support the project's
crowdfunding campaign.
Filming and post-production Filming for
Azmaish took place in varied locations in India and Pakistan including
Mumbai,
Delhi,
Karachi,
Lahore, and parts of
Haryana and
Sindh, with Claire Pijman, Peter Brugman, Asad Faruqi, and Mo Azmi working as the
directors of photography. While Sumar narrowed down the cities that she wanted to visit in Pakistan, Koechlin chose the Indian locales; they were assisted by a research team. Other parts of the film were shot in India in a separate schedule. The crew visited Mumbai,
Maharashtra where they filmed sections of the film in the local trains and celebrated the Hindu festival of
Holi with the locals in the city. The remaining parts of the documentary were shot in the
North Indian states of
Delhi and
Haryana.
Azmaish was stalled for a brief period after the filming was completed. Having self-funded the project, with assistance from the European television networks, Sumar exhausted the film's initial budget of approximately 200,000 during the filming process. Sumar said that she was pleased with the film's
rough cut and felt that the "material [was] very rich". She also expressed her desire to have the film broadcast on European television networks and have a wide release in both India and Pakistan.
Azmaish had to rely on separate crowdfunding campaigns to meet the production costs. After an unsuccessful attempt at financing the project through a campaign on the American crowdfunding website
Indiegogo, which raised a sum of 8,393 of the required 70,000, Sumar opened another similar operation on the Mumbai-based platform Wishberry and was able to raise for post-production. Around 60% of the total money raised was contributed by people from India and Pakistan; the producers used
social media and
email marketing to encourage people to contribute to the campaign. Sumar told a Wishberry executive that she chose crowdfunding as the film "deals with something that is affecting every life in these two countries [...] when we ran out of funds and channels to get these funds from, it only made sense that we reach out to the people who this film is about".
Azmaish was
edited by Martin Hoffmann and the
sound mixing was done by Faiz Zaidi and Bhabani Mallik; the film's final cut ran for a total of 85 minutes. The film's music and background score was composed by Aamir Zaki. == Release ==