Hindi
PVR Director’s Rare and HumaraMovie come together to launch ‘Shuruaat’
MUMBAI: HumaraMovie is associating with PVR Directors Rare- limited release arm of PVR Group to launch Indian short film festival aptly called ‘Shuruaat’.
With over 400 short film entries and 13 finalists, ‘Shuruaat’ promises to be the offspring board for budding film makers, who will be guided throughout the production and have been given access to a script consultant as well as casting, production and editing.
The chosen filmmakers have created a short film around the topic ‘Interval’. The short film festival was open to filmmakers/creative artists all across India. The idea was to bring out the ingenuity in filmmaking and to cradle the creative mind of filmmakers.
The selected participants will have their films screened in PVR as well as on HumaraMovie platforms. The winner will be decided by an audience vote for Rs 1 lakh prize money. The screened films will also get a home video release and the top two films will get a world premiere at the Ladakh International Film Festival.
Filmmakers submitted an already existing film, along with a short 150 word biography about themselves. Participants were shortlisted basis their films and were given a topic on which they submitted screenplays. Based on the screenplays, 13 finalists were shortlisted who are now producing a short film with guidance from the mentors. There is no restriction on the genre of the film. The duration of the short film will be 15 minutes inclusive of opening and end credits.
The relevance of the festival came from the statistics that showcase 15,000 films certified in a year out of which 11000 are short films. This indicates that each year, the number of documentary and short film makers in India taken as a category together rises by at least 20,000.
The participants were mentored by popular names from the industry such as Imtiaz Ali, Anand Gandhi, Vikramaditya Motwane and Imtiaz Ali, Ritesh Shah, Kshiti Nijhawan Agrawal, Bijesh Jayarajan and Mukesh Chabbra.
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.
