Hindi
Vasan Bala’s ‘Peddlers’ is India’s official entry at Cannes
MUMBAI: Vasan Bala’s upcoming Hindi crime thriller ‘Peddlers‘ has been chosen to represent India officially at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival as part of International Critics‘ Week.
The film will also compete in the Camera d‘Or section.
Founded in 1962, Cannes Critics’ Week is the oldest parallel competitive section of the Cannes Film Festival. This is a parallel section at the Cannes Film Festival that discovered filmmakers like Wong Kar Wai and Bernardo Bertolucci among others.
Peddlers is a character-driven thriller about two parallel love stories – one about a cop and his married neighbour and the other of a girl on a mission and an aimless guy.
The film is about love, loss of innocence and coming of age.
Peddlers stars Gulshan Devaiah, Siddharth Menon, Kriti Malhotra and Nimrat Kaur, among others.
Eros International Media Ltd has collaborated with Anurag Kashyap Films Pvt Ltd (AKFPL) and Sikhya Entertainment for the film.
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.
