We consider the resonant production of fermions from an oscillating axial background. The classical evolution of the axial field is given by that of a massive pseudovector field, as suggested by the renormalizability of the theory. We look upon both the massive and the massless fermion production from a perturbative point of view. We obtain the corresponding spectrum and angular distributions for the different spins or helicities in the particular case of a spatial-like axial field. We also extend our study to the non-perturbative regime in the massless case and compare the results with the perturbative ones.