Hindi
Jalpari wins MIP Junior Kids Jury Award 2012 at Cannes
MUMBAI: Ultra Distributors‘ Jalpari – The Desert Mermaid recently won the MIP Junior Kids Jury Awards 2012 at Cannes. The MIP Junior Kids Jury award is the international showcase for children‘s and youth programmes and films.
As many as 115 producers from around the world had entered their programmes that were divided into three categories – Tweens (11-14 years), Kids (7-10 years) and Pre-school (3-6 years). This included both live action and animation in every category.
A jury of fifteen children from the International School of Nice judged their favourite film during a private screening session with the help of French TV presenter and producer, Billy. And the winning choice for the Tweens category, was the India presentation Jalpari – The Desert Mermaid.
The other entries for this category were Chilli Girl (Domo Animato – Columbia), Monster Mountain (Dancing Digital Animation – China), One and a Half Heroes (Fantawild Animation Inc – China) and The Eternal Song, Jazzit II – Zhejiang Dishun Tech Co, Ltd – China).
One interesting and shocking revelation noted by the experts in this year‘s MIP Junior was the Tweens are just not watching kids TV or only animation was not on their viewing list. They moved onto a more aspirational live action offering. They want to be immersed in stories and this bears out with their winning choice for the Tweens category, that was Jalpari – The Desert Mermaid.
This is the first time that an Indian film was selected that as well as won the award.
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.
