Hindi
Festival of Bangladeshi parallel films in Hyderabad from tomorrow
MUMBAI: A film festival featuring five films by top directors of Bangladesh‘s parallel cinema, a first of its kind event, is being held in Hyderabad starting tomorrow.
The three-day festival, being organised by Annapurna International School of Film and Media, will showcase Quiet Flows the River Chitra and Lalon by Tanvir Mokammel, Shadow of Life by Murad Parvez, Third Person Singular Number by Mostafa Sarwar Farooki and Ontorjatra by Tareque and Catherine Masud.
The 1998 made film Quiet Flows the River Chitra, based on the plight of a Hindu family which refuses to migrate to India after the partition of Indian sub-continent in 1947, has won seven national awards in Bangladesh including those for best direction, best film and best script.
Lalon is a film on the life and persona of famous 19th century mystic poet Lalon Fakir, steeped in Sufi tradition. It stars Bangladesh‘s leading actor Raisul Islam Assad in the title role.
Ontorjatra, directed by Tareque and his American wife Catherine, narrates the tale of a divorced Bangladeshi woman who returns to her homeland along with her son to attend the funeral of her former husband.
Third Person Singular Number is the story of inter-relationships among a convict serving a life sentence, a mentally liberated woman and a singer and asks a question: Can a woman, all on her own, lead a secured life in society?
Finally, Parvez‘s Shadow of Life is the story of a pregnant destitute woman who delivers a girl and how she portrays life of her daughter.
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.
