Making Teeli Pakistan's top platform

The Outsider’s Trajectory

Faheem Azam grew up in Multan, a city without a media industry. He never had access to formal training in film, theater, or performance. “I didn’t know about theater,” he says, but after overhearing a conversation about Radio Pakistan, something clicked. His family resisted his early attempts at performance, seeing it as unstable and inappropriate. By his late teens, Muzamil observes, most people from business families would follow a predictable path. Faheem did not.

He moved to Islamabad and spent over a decade trying to build a career in media. He acted, directed, and wrote for theater. He worked in radio and television. But Islamabad itself, he admits, was not the right market. It was “a city where the only media is news media.” After years of work that earned him respect in small circles, he felt unseen. In 2017, something broke inside. He had been measuring his self-worth by what others thought of him, and when they seemed indifferent, he questioned whether he had anything to offer at all.

He took a month off in Lahore and remembered the good work he had done in Islamabad, the projects that had moved people. He decided to stop seeking permission and approval. “Let’s go back and work on our own,” he thought. “And after that, no one will tell me how to do it.”

How the Platform Began

A week after that decision, Faheem met people who wanted to build a digital platform. He had no idea what would come next, but he had a vision. He was clear about one thing: if they wanted to do this, they had to do it the right way. “Everything will have a budget,” he told them. “Actors will have a budget. Writers will have a process. Script writing is the least expensive process of filmmaking.”

Teeli took four months to release its first video, not because of production delays, but because of scripting. “Dozens of scripts were written,” Faheem explains. They tried and failed repeatedly. Then they landed on “Darzi Ki Marzi,” and everything changed. India was talking about a product that came from Pakistan. It was a game changer not because it was funded like Bollywood, but because it was crafted like a film: process-first, execution-second.

Theater as Foundation

When Muzamil asks about Pakistan’s theater scene, Faheem traces its rise and fall. In the early 2000s, there was almost no theater in Islamabad. Then General Musharraf decided the capital needed culture to showcase to diplomats. He brought in Kamran Lashari, a theater legend from Lahore, and the state poured money and permission into the scene. Suddenly, people could make plays. Suddenly, there was infrastructure.

Faheem was one of them. Theater taught him craft. But when the political winds shifted and terrorism came, state support dried up. Theater in Islamabad became a footnote. The lesson was clear: without state backing or a sustainable model, even talented artists cannot build anything.

The Comedy Platform and Its Limits

Stand-up comedy in Karachi followed a similar arc. Faheem helped create an ecosystem. By 2016, there were fifty shows in a few months. There were mentors. There was structure. But it required constant attention, and when the organizers stepped back, the platform collapsed. “Everyone built their own path, quality went down,” he says. Individual performers scattered to YouTube and dirty shows, but the collective infrastructure vanished.

Teeli was supposed to be different because it had a clear business model and a founder who refused to skip steps. When Muzamil asks where the industry goes from here, Faheem points to a paradox. “I do not think that OTT platforms are a threat to cinemas,” he says. But he knows that cinemas are closing anyway. The real question is whether Pakistan will create the conditions for filmmakers to tell stories at scale, or whether talent will keep flowing outward.

The State and the Story

Toward the end, Faheem makes a point Muzamil keeps returning to: the problem is not talent. It is that no one has trained people in storytelling. And that training cannot happen in isolation. “When you have these issues,” he says, “it all comes down to an institutionalized approach.” Turkey produces world-class content because generations of writers and directors built a system. Pakistan has artists but no system.

Faheem’s vision is that someday, someone will make Narcos Pakistan, telling real stories from the Cold War and beyond. But for that to happen, the state has to decide that cultural narrative matters. And right now, he argues, it does not. “We’re still in 1985,” he says. Creatives work against the tide, and without institutional support, no platform lasts long.

“Thank you so much for this super insightful conversation,” Muzamil says as they wrap. The conversation had run over an hour, something rare for the show. Faheem had brought depth to every layer.