Hindi
Indian film ‘I D’ is in competition of Edinburgh Film Festival
NEW DELHI: The Indian film ‘I.D.‘ by Kamal KM is one of the two Asian films competing at the 67th Edinburgh International Film Festival this month.
The Festival being held from 19 to 30 June will also feature Kang Yi-kwan‘s Juvenile Offender from South Korea.
I.D. has competed at festivals in India and Europe. Produced among others by the Oscar award-winning Resul Pookutty, the film has been filmed by Madhu Neelakandan. It stars Geetanjali Thapa, Murari Kumar, Rukshana Tabassum, Shinjini Raval, and Shashi Sharma among others.
The 90-minute film in Hindi and English is about Charu and her friends – all their mid-twenties – who share a rented apartment in a sky-rise in Mumbai. One day a labourer comes to paint a soiled wall at her house. Irritated that her flat-mate did not inform her, she asks the man to hurry up. A few minutes later, she finds him unconscious on the floor. Charu, panicked and desperate to do what‘s right, gets entwined in a series of incidents that take her through the city. Anywhere that might lead her to some identity of the man.
Kang‘s countryman Bong Joon-ho heads the competition jury.
In addition to Offender the festival is showing five more South Korean films in a tribute to the country, including spy thriller The Berlin File political drama National Security and high-school drama Pluto
The festival also includes three indie films from the Philippines, including John Torres‘ Lukas The Strange Lukas Nino, four indie films from China, including Zhang Yuan Beijing Flicker and three features from Japan, including Nakata Hideo‘s The Complex.
The festival opens with Drake Doremus‘ US drama Breath In, starring Australia‘s Guy Pearce, and closes with the world premiere of John McKay‘s Not Another Happy Ending about a young authoress in Glasgow who is suffering from writer‘s block.
One innovation at this year‘s festival is the introduction of "Film Fest Miles", with which audience members compete for flights. Each film is allocated miles according to the distance to its country of origin, giving Asian film fans a distinct advantage.
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.
