Hindi
Poster of ‘Detective Byomkesh Bakshy!’ launched in Kolkata
KOLKATA: Director Dibakar Banerjee along with his lead actor, Sushant Singh Rajput, released the first look poster of the upcoming film Detective Byomkesh Bakshy! at the Great Eastern Hotel in Kolkata (now The Lalit Great Eastern Hotel).
The film Detective Byomkesh Bakshy! is set in the back drop of World War 2 and it captures the Calcutta (now Kolkata) of that time. The motion poster was also released as a fitting tribute to a World War II air-raid in the war-torn history of Kolkata.
Detective Byomkesh Bakshy! is an upcoming Hindi crime thriller film directed by Dibakar Banerjee and produced by Aditya Chopra in association with Yash Raj Films and Dibakar Banerjee Productions. The film is based on the detective character Byomkesh Bakshi created by the Bengali writer Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay and the film is titled ‘Detective Byomkesh Bakshy’ to make it more contemporary. The film stars Sushant Singh Rajput, Anand Tiwari and Swastika Mukherjee in principal roles. The film is scheduled for release on 10 April 2015.
Dibakar Banerjee told the media, “In late 1942 and early 1943, Calcutta was the last frontier of the British Empire, holding out against the Japanese invasion of Asia. As Japanese bombs were falling on Calcutta dockyard, around The Great Eastern Hotel, history was being created and Calcutta stepped on to the world stage. It’s right here that Byomkesh’s first adventure catapulted him from anonymity to dangerous fame. I can’t imagine a more fitting place to launch the first look of Detective Byomkesh Bakshy! than this hotel and right on this day in 1942, this would have been full of chaos and mayhem as bombs fell around it seventy years ago!”
Shooting for the film began in early 2014, and ended in May 2014. A part of the movie has been shot in Kolkata and Mumbai. Some scenes were shot in an abandoned mill in Mumbai’s Byculla region.
“Shooting locations of the film in Kolkata was finalized in February 2012. Shooting did take place in Lalbazar, Presidency University, Coffee House and Bow Barracks. The cast was shooting for the film in Agarpara in January 2014,” said a cast member.
Dibakar Banerjee has paid attention to every detail and he further said that every aspect of his film brings back the bygone era.
“The planes seen on the poster of the film are the exact replica of the real Japanese planes which were used during the bombing in 1943. The planes at that time looked very different from the way the planes look today. Japan had done an aerial bombing attack on Calcutta and this is the central theme of the film,” he concluded.
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.
