Hindi
American LGBT Film Festival in Delhi to feature five films
NEW DELHI: Five prominent American films will be screened in a special LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) festival to be held in the capital next week.
The American Centre has organized the festival, which will be held from 25 to 27 June.
The opening film is the 2001 film Kissing Jessica Stein by Charles Herman-Wurmfeld and stars Jennifer Westfeldt, Heather Juergensen and Tovah Feldshuh. It is about a woman out to find a perfect man, ending up finding the perfect woman instead.
The other films include the Brokeback Mountain (2005), which is American epic romantic drama directed by Ang Lee. It is a film adaptation of the 1997 short story of the same name by Annie Proulx. The film stars Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Anne Hathaway, Michelle Williams and Randy Quaid. The movie depicts the complex emotional and sexual relationship between two men in the American West from 1963 to 1983.
Also screened will be But I’m a Cheerleader, which is a 1999 satirical romantic comedy film directed by Jamie Babbit with Natasha Lyonne starring as Megan Bloomfield, a high school cheerleader whose parents send her to a residential inpatient conversion therapy camp to cure her lesbianism and she comes to embrace her sexual orientation, despite the therapy, and falls in love. The supporting cast includes Melanie Lynskey, Dante Basco, Eddie Cibrian, Clea DuVall, Cathy Moriarty, RuPaul, Richard Moll, Mink Stole, Kip Pardue, Michelle Williams and Bud Cort.
Lead with Love directed by Jenny Mackenzkie is a poignant film that follows the true stories of four families’ experiences in learning that they have a lesbian, gay, or bisexual child and then going to psychiatrists etc for help.
The closing film is Boys Don’t Cry, a 1999 American independent romantic drama film directed by Kimberly Peirce and co-written by Andy Bienen. The film is a dramatization of the real-life story of Brandon Teena, a transman played in the film by Hilary Swank, who is beaten, raped and murdered by his male acquaintances after they discover he is transgender. The film explores the themes of freedom, courage, identity and empowerment.
Hindi
Remembering Gyan Sahay, the lens behind film, television and advertising
From a puppet rabbit selling poppadums to Hindi cinema, he framed it all.
MUMBAI: There are careers, and then there are canvases. Gyan Sahay, the veteran cinematographer, director, and producer who passed away on 10 March 2026 in Mumbai, had one of the latter. Over several decades in the Indian film and television industry, he turned lenses, lights, and the occasional puppet rabbit into something approaching art.
A graduate of the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) in Pune, Sahay built his reputation as a director of photography across a career that stretched from the early 1970s all the way to the digital age. He was the kind of craftsman who understood that a well-composed shot is not merely a technical achievement but a quiet act of storytelling.
For most Indians of a certain age, however, Sahay will forever be the man behind the rabbit. His direction of the iconic long-running television commercial for Lijjat Papad, featuring its now-legendary puppet bunny, gave the country one of its most cheerfully persistent advertising images. It was the sort of work that sneaks into the national subconscious and takes up permanent residence.
His big-screen credits as cinematographer include Anokhi Pehchan (1972), Pagli (1974), Pas de Deux (1981), and Hum Farishte Nahin (1988). In 1999, he stepped behind a different kind of camera altogether, making his directorial debut with Sar Ankhon Par, a drama that featured Vikas Bhalla and Shruti Ulfat, with a cameo by Shah Rukh Khan for good measure.
On television, Sahay was particularly prized for his command of multi-camera production setups, a skill that made him a go-to technician for large-scale shows and reality programmes. In an industry that has never been especially patient with complexity, he was the calm hand on the rig.
In later life, Sahay turned teacher. He participated regularly in masterclasses and Digi-Talks, often hosted by organisations such as Bharatiya Chitra Sadhna, sharing hard-won wisdom on cinematography, the comedy of timing in a shot, and the sweeping changes brought by the shift from celluloid to digital. He was also said to have been involved in a project concerning a biographical film on Infosys co-founder N.R. Narayana Murthy.
Tributes from the film industry poured in following the news of his passing, with colleagues remembering him as a senior cameraman who served as a rare bridge between two entirely different eras of Indian cinema. That is, perhaps, the finest thing one can say of any craftsman: he kept up, and he brought others along with him.
