Hindi
Mumbai fest lines up award-winning films from Cannes
MUMBAI: A few award-winning films from the Cannes Critics week and the National Film Awards spanning the last 50 years are to be screened at the 13th Mumbai Film Festival.
The organisers of the Film Festival have created a special section to celebrate 50 years of Cannes Critics week along with National Award winning debut features.
A few of the international classics that are to be screened in this section include Valeria Gaii Guermanika‘s Everybody Dies But Me, Ken Loach‘s Kes, Jerzy Skolimowski‘s Walkover amongst others. The films that have won the Indian National Film Awards including Adoor Gopalakirshnan‘s Swayamvaram, Shyam Benegal‘s Ankur‘ and Girish Kasaravalli‘s Ghatasraddha will also be screened.
Mumbai Film Festival, Director Srinivasan Naryanan said, "By juxtaposing the Cannes Critics Week award winning films along with the Indian debut features which won National Film Awards, we are trying to create an analytical study of the films that have created trends abroad and in India, the narrative structure and the technical aspects which went into the making of these path breaking films."
The Mumbai Film Festival has also decided to invite the directors of the selected films. "We will be inviting the filmmakers. It will be a treat for cinema connoisseurs to be able to interact with these cinema legends. We are only happy to be paying tribute to these masters," observed Narayanan.
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.
