Aazadi (freedom) is a project that began, as all projects tend to - at least for me - as a combination of dream, fragments of visuals and sounds swirling around in my imagination and a need to create something new. What set this one apart from the countless other ideas that start in a similar way for me was an unshakable urge to tell a story that combined so much of what I love and am attracted to, the human spirit, courage, hope, determination and judo, the sport I had been a part of for years.

Whenever I have moved to a new place, the first thing I do is to find myself a judo club. On moving to Mumbai in 2013, that club was Bombay Judo Club, the first in India. Some time before I left India, I met a deaf judoka with whom I trained many times who was preparing for a competition for deaf and blind judoka. This intrigued me hugely. Of course, I had always known about blind judo - it is a huge part of the paralympics - but something just stuck with me about the subject. Perhaps it was the fact that I was seeing first hand how blind, deaf and otherwise disabled people in India were treated there which left me dismayed. Perhaps it was that my grandmother had herself gone blind and others in my family suffer from an eye disease that degrades the sight. In truth it was both, plus, knowing how this sport had enriched my own life with confidence and many other things besides.

Either way, I suddenly knew I wanted to make a film about it and despite working in Bollywood, I knew it had to be a non-fiction film though I have to admit I probably spent at least 24 hours imagining an all-singing, all-dancing version of it!

But, wanting to make a film about something and actually making a film about something are two very very different things, at least for me. For me, a film is a film regardless of whether it is fiction or non-fiction (I take the same thinking into other work such as commercials and branded content etc.). What is important is story, message and communicating it to an audience and what I was missing at that early stage was those essential narrative building blocks - character and story.

I remember being sat on a Hamburg u-bahn coming home from a difficult training session not long after my grandmother had died when I realised that what I really needed to do was to base this growing idea on female characters. When living in India, I would sometimes see how young women would just disappear from training and found out that it was so often their families deciding that they needed to concentrate on their ‘education’. Over time, it dawned on me that this ‘education’ was learning to be an attractive wife, learning to cook, clean and not becoming a kick-ass black belt with more options open to her. Of course, I can not say this is what always happens, that would be unfair, but it happened at a rate that was unmistakable. Imagining how much more difficult it must be for a woman in India that had even fewer options due to their economic status and being blind in a society that is unforgiving for the unsighted, things started to click in my brain and a I started to write, research, talk to people and sketch things out.

I started to reach out to the various parties I still knew in Indian judo (despite having moved to Hamburg in 2016) to research various characters and found there was a relatively large blind judo community. Some characters came and went as I made enquiries but slowly and surely, a small handful appeared and I knew there was a film within the general idea and a narrative began to form in my mind and scribbled across notebooks and scraps of paper.

Fast-forwarding through months and months of research (years actually), talking to people, finding out who is who, what is what, creating trust in the communities and organisations and generally finding my way into it, my wife Kriti, co-producer and cinematographer (yes, I’m lucky), was shooting a corporate image film in Bangalore whose executive producer, Steffi was interested in Aazadi enough to suggest we launch a crowdfunding campaign together to kickstart things. Fast-forwarding through more months of fundraising and then more again as corona virus took hold, we eventually got into a position where a recce trip to India to talk to some people, do some fact-finding on the ground, test some camera gear and generally start feeling that a project that began in my head long ago, then developed on paper, could translate to a screen.

For anybody who has stumbled across this online as a way to reading about a non-fiction film and how to make one, I cannot offer all of the answers, mostly because the questions are always different on each and every project. However, one thing I can say, getting some footage whilst developing a project or whilst in pre-production in order to make a teaser, trailer or ‘sizzle’ reel has been an essential part of the process. It allows you as the filmmaker to see whether it works on screen enough to spend what will become years of your life making. And, considering these things cost money, not only shows you whether it will be worth it but, importantly, this footage gives you a tangible, relatable and real example of what it is you are trying to do. It helps in raising money, awareness and interest with potential co-producers/financiers having something to see as well as to read. I cannot say how important it was to do this and get a trailer made and you can see the result from this trip in the teaser trailer for Aazadi on my work page. It also opens up the opportunity of going to film markets/forums/pitching events which happen alongside many festivals or independently (feel free to read a bit more about some of these in my blog).

This trip also gave me another valuable tool. It allowed me to understand or solidify not just what the story was but how I might tell the story. Who would work on camera? Who wouldn’t? What would? What wouldn’t? What could be the structure? In whose voice(s)? Questions that keep you awake at night started to find some answers. Of course, they also created new ones that will bounce around in my head for at least as long as the project is in production, post-production and probably forever more but at least I knew my path, a lot of it was confirming ideas and plans I had written months and years before. But knowing that (if you can ever actually know, let’s actually go with having the belief that) it could work was a huge help. I would be lying if I said there were not things that it proved would not work and characters who propelled themselves as more (or less) integral to the story than I may have originally believed. But, this is development and development is just that, write, re-write, think, re-think and find a path that works - at least for the time being because more that will need re-working and re-writing is waiting around every corner. However, equally, some very nice opportunities might just present themselves to you if you are flexible and open to noticing them along the way.

There is an inherent gamble in making a film and perhaps knowing that and playing that game is part of the rush that made me always want to make films. But the gamble isn’t just whether an audience will like it (of which of course I have to believe they will), I have learned that part of the gamble is to press the big red button that says start shooting despite not having everything you would want in place. As the end of 2021 drew nearer, with coronavirus still breathing it’s not yet gone away breath down everybody’s neck, the button was pressed. That was the only way to truly start to develop the film, to develop the relationships we will need going forward and develop how the film will be when finished with the key word being develop. I’m very grateful to all who have donated to our cause that have allowed that first trip, it was invaluable and I’m very grateful to the fundraising efforts of Steffi for gathering what she has from people I am still not likely to meet, the people I do know who have donated, and those who have mysteriously found their way to it either from the judo community or my shameless social media requests, emails or whatever. At this stage, I guess it would be silly not to invite you to help, truly, every penny will count not just in taking this project from actual development with footage that will (hopefully) make the final cut but into production and with an impact campaign that can help better people’s lives to live alongside a finished film. Click here to donate, how ever little, however large.

However, despite this great start, what wasn’t there were things such as co-production agreements with broadcasters, a distribution agreement, money from funding bodies to finish the film, money for post-production (a subject I will blog heavily about) and no guarantees these will ever actually materialise. However, the game has to be played and if there is ever to be a film that previously didn’t exist in this world, the gamble had to be taken in order to tell the stories of the amazing characters in the film and attract these essential partners. What these characters are doing, the courage they are showing, the choices they are making are inspiring. They are changing their lives and the lives of those around them in situations that would be difficult in those societies where women and girls are largely free to do what they choose but in India, what they are doing is truly incredible. Simply, it felt, as it always had, like it just had to happen and so the dice were rolled.

At the end of 2021, the journey began with cameras rolling on the second day of 2022 after a week and a few days spent in quarantine.

You have to both expect things not to go to plan and plan for things to not go as expected. What happened in the time with these people, testing, developing and filming, these stories did not always go as planned. But in expecting and planning for that, I found that opportunities arose which I expect, when the film is finished, I will look back on and be happy things went wrong when they did to allow other things to happen. The major casualty of this first trip was one of the central points to the narrative, part of the glue that will hold the three or more individual stories together to form the whole. A victim of coronavirus and rising numbers again in India and cancelled in just the second week of being there, I immediately knew a waves of filming will need to be done to complete the film (at least). But, it also allowed us to be with characters a little longer in their homes and familiar surroundings and allowed me to concentrate on them and their stories in an extended way which will really come across on screen. What was lost in not being able to film a set-up that I felt would be critical to the look and feel of the overall film allowed a bit more time with individuals and whether that planned set-up will actually ever get done or not in the future, what matters the most is character in the story and again, such a valuable experience in going forward to continue developing before heavy duty production (and post) later on.

So, one problem, creates a solution which creates another problem which creates another solution and so it goes on and on and on. And now, having come back from India, there are endless hours of footage to go through, organise, log, transcribe, translate and start looking at how they create the developmental building blocks on which to continue. The first thing I have done since returning was to attend a pitch event to attract further financing and partners on the project, just days after returning home which you can read all about here. It’s fair to say that I am happy with the way this first stage of making this film has unfolded and I would officially suggest that this is a film that has moving from the development stage and striding as confidently as possible into the production phase with more trips to India to come. However, as ever, production will cost as will post and what is becoming a huge factor, getting the thing seen. It’s a sad fact that such a tiny percentage of films made each year actually get some sort of official release. Tens and tens of thousands are made and it’s actually a pretty small percentage of them that find an audience outside of one or two festivals. Even getting to festivals in order to gain some sort of release is difficult with a minor percentage, even more so for non-fiction. Put simply. It’s hard. But the ball is rolling. However, if you do happen to be a production company, producer with links to film funding, sales agent, distribution company, broadcaster etc - do get in touch.

Every day I will remind myself of my grandmother, of the girls and women who came and went in my judo club in Mumbai, of the stories my wife and her friends tell me of growing up in India and of course, of what I have seen and heard from those that were filmed and will continue to be. This story needs and deserves to be heard and it goes way beyond me and those swirling thoughts that began in my head, made their way on to paper, into pitch decks and now onto a couple of hard drives. The screen now belongs to them and their stories of hope, courage and determination, I just have the responsibility but also the privilege of moulding them to fit the screen and to present to an audience and I know it is a privilege and responsibility we all felt during filming. I would also like to say to anyone who has donated or is thinking about it, I also feel the responsibility of producing something you can be proud of giving to, a film that you feel a part of too and proud to have supported, even if just a tiny bit with a social project that lives beside it.

There is a website for the project which you can find here and again it would be stupid of me not to ask you to contribute to the crowdfunding campaign again if you would be so kind.

I will update this page from time to time as I reach major milestones and other things happen and will inevitably be writing about the process along the way in my blog and via social media (so follow me - links are at the bottom).

I will leave you with the words of one of the main characters. We talked about how in judo, we must follow the Japanese proverb of something like, if you fall seven times, you stand up eight times (which I think also applies to making a film). She then asked me to never give up in making this film because nobody will ever know their story. That has always been the plan and will continue to be…