Hindi
Several National Award winners slated for screening in New York
NEW DELHI: Anurag Kashyap’s highly lauded film ‘Ugly’ will open the fourteeth New York Indian Film Festival taking place next month.
Slated from 5 to 10 May, the festival will screen a mix of 23 narrative features and 11 documentaries. The festival is curated by Aseem Chabbra, a senior Indian journalist based in the US.
Geethu Mohandas’ Liar’s Dice which recently won two National Film Awards will be the centerpiece film. The closing film is the renowned Aparna Sen’s Goynar Baksho.
The festival will also present a retrospective of British-based Gurinder Chaddha’s documentaries.
Kamal Swaroop’s documentary about Dada Saheb Phalke’s life in Varanasi, Rangbhoomi made for the Films Division which won the best non-feature National Award for 2013 is also being screened.
Delhi-based scribe turned filmmaker Utpal Borpujari will present his documentary on Naga folk music, Songs of the Blue Hills.
Karan Bali’s 80 minute documentary, An American in Madras, based on American-born filmmaker Ellis R Dungan’s travails in the Tamil film industry will get a screening alongside the recently released Gulabi Gang by Nishtha Jain.
Nagraj Manjule’s Fandry and Sumitra Bhave and Sunil Sukthankar’s Astu which also won two National Awards each and Gajendra Ahire’s Postcard are three Marathi features to be screened at the festival. Assamese feature As The River Flows (Ekhon Nodir Xipare) by Bidyut Kotoky, will also be screened.
Sumanta Ghosal’s The Unseen Sequence, a documentary exploring the dance form of Bharatnatyam through the art of Malvika Sarukkai, and Jaideep Varma’s documentary on Indian stand-up comedy, I Am Offended will also be screened along with Neela Venkataraman’s Sound Check documentary on music.
Nagesh Kukunoor’s Lakshmi, the winner of Toronto Reel Film Festival and Amit Masurkar’s Sulemani Keeda, Buddhadeb Dasgupta’s Nawaazuddin starrer Anwar Ka Ajab Kissa and, are also slated for screening.
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.
