Hindi
Excel Home Video releases DVD to celebrate Intl Women’s Day
MUMBAI: On the occassion of International Womam‘s Day, Excel Home Video has released a DVD that carries four women centric films namely Caramel, Persepolis, The Devil Wears Prada and Flight Plan.
The DVD is priced at Rs 499 and ranges across genres like drama, comedy, action and animation.
Directed by Nadine Labaki, Caramel is a bittersweet drama that casts a rare gaze on the lives of five Lebanese women tackling forbidden love, binding traditions, repressed sexuality and Duty vs. Desire.
Persepolis is an animated film that depicts a tale of young Marjane‘s struggle to ‘grow up‘ in the repressive regime of Iran. The film won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film and was named best animated feature by the New York Film critics circle.
The Devil Wears Prada is a comedy starring Academy Award winner Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway. The movie reflects the nuances of women in corporate life and the work place.
Flight Plan is an action thriller that showcases a mother‘s resolve to save her daughter in the face of adversity.
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.
