Hindi
Paul Cox feels anyone can get Oscars by spending money
PANAJI: His love for India has not diminished despite his not having come here for some years. And his energy does not appear to have diminished even when he is in his seventies.
But there is one thing that Australian filmmaker Paul Cox is very troubled about. He is unable to understand the fascination that everyone including Indian filmmakers have with the Academy awards (Oscars). He says anyone with money can get these awards, and therefore has no respect for them.
Talking about Indian cinema at press meet at the ongoing International Film Festival of India, he said he did not feel India has had a bigger filmmaker than Satyajit Ray. Ray was fantastic, a splendid human being, Paul added.
And he was very clear that he prefers Bollywood to Hollywood. He wondered why Indians are always comparing Bollywood with Hollywood. He said Indian cinema should not try to find similarities with films from America.
"We should be ashamed most films are pathetic. I would rather read a book than see a bad film", says this award-winning Dutch born director who did not have any film here but has stopped over on his way to the International Film Festival of Kerala in Thiruvananthapuram where he is in the Jury.
Referring to the abysmal content of some films, Paul deplored cinema‘s exploitation of sex and violence, “If incest occurs in society, should that be an excuse to show it in graphic detail? Must filmmakers pander to base desires? Everyone is making commercial films to please others."
"I love India, it is a home away from home for me and when I nearly died from cancer, I longed for India. Kindness matters above all else in life. But today, I feel some Indians have lost their capacity for kindness.”
Krzysztof Kies‘lowski, the Polish film director and screenwriter best known internationally for The Decalogue (1989), was the last great filmmaker who touched the true potential of cinema. "But today, we (filmmakers) have lost their humanity,” he added.
He prefaced his critique by a humorous anecdote of how a print of his film had been stolen from the projection box at a Delhi filmfest and the next day copies flooded the grey market.
His other great loves are the Italian composer Vivaldi, the 17th century Dutch painter Vermeer and his (Cox‘s) wife Cathy, whom he met while both were being treated for liver cancer in hospital where he even wrote a book. Needless to add, signature traits of Cox’s work are a deep humanism and an affinity with the arts, as evinced in Vincent: The Life and Death of Vincent van Gogh and The Diaries of Vaslav Nijinsky.
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.
