Hindi
TZP, Honeymoon Travels to be screened at two US film fests
NEW DELHI: America is ready to showcase films like Taare Zameen Par and Honeymoon Travels Private Ltd at its two major events featuring Indian films held separately in New York and Los Angeles.
The first event, which is being held in New York, is called Engendered – Sex, Sexuality, Ritual and Religion. Organised by the Indo-American Arts Council, the event will begin on 18 April and continue till 20 April.
It will have films in two sections namely, “Dahleez: Beyond the Threshold” and “Pehchaan: I am not me.”
While Dahleez has screenings documenting sex workers‘ lives including Mira Nair‘s Indian Cabaret and Tales of the Night Fairies by Shohini Ghosh, Pehchaan has queer film screenings exploring “otherness,” like Honeymoon Travels Private Ltd by Reema Kagti, About Elsewhere by Priya Sen and Milind Soman Made Me Gay by Harjant Gill.
The second event is the sixth Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles. The festival, which will take place from 22 to 27 April, will have a combination of features, documentaries and shorts. Jury and audience choice prizes will be awarded to the best feature, documentary and short film.
The event will open with Richie Mehta‘s Amal while Mumbai Cutting…A City Unfolds by the ten Indian directors Sudhir Mishra, Anurag Kashyap, Rahul Dholakia, Ruchi Narain, Kundan Shah, Revathy, Shashank Ghosh, Jahnu Barua, Manish Jha and Rituparno Ghosh will close the event.
Aamir Khan‘s award-winning Taare Zameen Par will also be screened during the festival.
Aditionally, there will also be a tribute to Bollywood star Madhuri Dixit on 25 April. It will include a moderated discussion with the star followed by the screening of Mrityudand (The Death Sentence) by Prakash Jha. The second film of the tribute will be Dil To Pagal Hai (My heart is crazy) on 26 April.
Other films to be screened include Santosh Sivan‘s Before the Rains, A home in the Sky by Bipin Nadkarni, Adoor Gopalakrishnan‘s Naalu Pennungal (Four Women) and Kissing Cousins by Amyn Kaderali.
Other sections include “Youth Vision” which is a section of the programme that showcases feature-length and short family films for young and adult audiences in English and several Indian languages.
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.
