Hindi
Big Cinemas plans to screen films with English subtitles
MUMBAI: In a bid to attract the hearing-impaired and non-Hindi speaking audience to its theaters pan India, Reliance ADAG’s theatre chain Big Cinemas is planning to screen the forthcoming movies with English subtitles.
To begin with, Big Cinemas will screen the Amir Khan-starrer Ghajini with English subtitles from its second week at digital screens in BIG Cinemas’ Wadala and Metro BIG Cinemas in Mumbai.
“We wanted to expand our audience reach and hence, decided to take up this new initiative. This will ensure that the cinema medium can be enjoyed by a larger number of the public – especially the hearing impaired who could not earlier understand the dialogues,” says Big Cinemas COO Tushar Dhingra.
“The release of Ghajini, being an eagerly awaited film, was an ideal way for us to start offering this facility and will set a trend for future releases,” Dhingra adds.
Post Ghajini, the next big release that will be screened with English subtitles by Big Cinemas across its digital theatres is Chandni Chowk To China. The film, directed by Nikhil Advani and starring Akshay Kumar and Deepika Padukone, will hit the theatres on 16 January.
Adlabs Digital Cinema COO Patrick von Sychowski states, “Digital cinema technology makes it easy to introduce such innovations. Hence, we look forward to introducing more such innovations for the benefit of the audience.”
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.
