

Rao received the Best Actor Award and Mehta the Best Director Award at the 61st National Film Awards ceremony. It was released theatrically in India on 18 October 2013 and met with critical acclaim. Mehta also won the best director award at New York Indian Film Festival and at the Indian Film Festival of Stuttgart. The film was awarded the Silver Gateway Trophy at the Mumbai film festival while Mehta won the Best Director award. It was screened at several other film festivals including the 14th Mumbai Film Festival, the New York Indian Film Festival, the Indian Film Festival of Stuttgart, the Dubai International Film Festival and the Chicago South Asian Film Festival. Shahid had its world premiere at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival's City to City programme in 2012. Anuj Rakesh Dhawan was the director of photography.

Apurva Asrani contributed additional inputs on the script with Mehta and also served as the film's editor. Eventually, he met Singh, who wrote the script after researching Azmi's life and spending months interviewing Azmi's family. He began his research for the film nearly three months after Azmi's murder. When he heard about Azmi's murder, he felt the need to make a film about his life. Mehta took a break after some of his films were box-office failures. Based on the life of lawyer and human rights activist Shahid Azmi, who was assassinated in 2010, the film stars Rajkummar Rao as Azmi Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub, Prabhleen Sandhu and Baljinder Kaur appear in supporting roles. Shahid is a 2013 Indian Hindi-language biographical drama film directed by Hansal Mehta, written by Sameer Gautam Singh and jointly produced by Anurag Kashyap and Sunil Bohra in association with Ronnie Screwvala and Siddharth Roy Kapur under the UTV Spotboy banner.
