Hindi
Abhay Deol in IFFLA jury
NEW DELHI: Actor-producer Abhay Deol has been included in the jury for the 13th annual Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles.
The Festival is being held from 8 to 12 April at the ArcLight Hollywood.
The other narrative jury members are filmmaker Sean Baker, HFPA member and frequent Board director Yoram Kahana, Warner Bros executive vice president (physical production) Ravi Mehta, and author and film curator Berenice Reynaud.
The shorts jury include actor Danny Pudi, Outfest Director of Programming Lucy Mukerjee-Brown, Sundance Shorts Programmer Lisa Ogdie, and Heather Morris Washington, Manager of the Emerging Writers Fellowship at Universal.
Aditya Vikram Sengupta’s debut feature Labour Of Love following one day in the life of a married couple has been added to the festival’s lineup. It screens on 10 April.
Other films include Jai Ho by Delhi-based filmmaker Umesh Aggarwal who had attended the premiere of the film in New York earlier this year.
The world premiere of British comedy One Crazy Thing is the centerpiece this year. The opening night film is Haraamkhor, helmer Shlok Sharma’s debut starring Nawazuddin Siddiqui, and the closing film is Dhanak by Nagesh Kukunoor.
Other highlights are Danis Tanovic’s Tigers, Cannes entry Titli by Kanu Behl and the Los Angeles premiere of Miss India America.
IFFLA will unspool 25 films, including four world premieres, seven North American bows, two American and 10 Los Angeles preems from not just India, but also the US, the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Cuba, in 10 languages including English, Spanish and German.
Directed by Amit Gupta, One Crazy Thing stars Ray Panthaki and Daisy Bevan and centers on a man struggling to overcome the notoriety from his sex tape.
Tanovic’s Tigers stars Bollywood star Emraan Hashmi and is about the true-life tale of the salesman who took on a drug company that marketed a deadly baby formula.
Titli is a coming-of-age story starring Shashank Arora; while Miss India Americastars Tiya Sircar and Hannah Simone in the story of a woman who enters a beauty pageant after losing her boyfriend to a former Miss India America.
IFFLA Artistic Director Jasmine Jaisinghani said, “Many of the films at this year’s IFFLA look at contemporary youth from diverse backgrounds, united in their creative ways of overcoming life’s situations. The palpable energy of youth spirit runs throughout our film lineup, and these stories take you on an adventurous journey.”
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.
