Hindi
South Indian movies to follow IIFA, host awards abroad
MUMBAI: Dubai will play host to the first-ever South Indian International Movie Award (SIIMA) on 21 and 22 June. The award function will reward the best works in Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam and Kannada cinema.
SIIMA will be an annual affair and will take South Indian movies to new territories on the lines of the IIFA.
SIIMA will reward greatest achievements in cinema during the year 2011 which will be nominated by a jury of artists and professionals from all the four industries.
Vishnuvardhan Induri, the man behind the successful Celebrity Cricket League, has conceptualised the awards function. According to a statement by the organisers, this will be the first time that the South Indian film industry will have its awards abroad. With the function, the organisers will promote South Indian cinema on a global platform that would increase overseas revenues.
Though the industry down south constitutes the largest number of films released in India and the Indian box office collections of a hit South Indian movie is at par with any hit Bollywood film, the overseas revenue of a South Indian movie is 10 per cent of a Bollywood movie, the statement observed.
The organisers have sent out invitations to all the big stars across India with a hope to get participation not just from those who have been nominated and those who are performing but from the film fraternity at large.
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.
