Hindi
Bella Thorne & Kyra Sedgwick set for thriller ‘Big Sky’
MUMBAI: The star of Disney Channel’s about-to-end Shake It Up continues her march into more mature material. Having joined the indie Home Invasion earlier this year, Bella Thorne has now signed on along with Kyra Sedgwick as the leads in Manis Film’s thriller Big Sky.
The English language debut by Jorge Michel Grau, who helmed the original Spanish language chiller We Are What We Are, features Thorne as Hazel and the former The Closer star as her protective mother Dee. On their way to a desert facility to help the teen deal with her paralysing agoraphobia, the two find themselves attacked by gunmen and Hazel has to fight her own demons for the duo to survive.
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Frank Grillo, who starred in End of Watch, Zero Dark Thirty and will be in upcoming CaptainAmerica: The Winter Soldier plays the male lead in the film along with Les Miserables’ Aaron Tveit. Randy Manis, Matthew Salloway and Christina Papagjika are producing. Christine Vachon is executive producing for Killer Films with Jeffrey V. Mandel of TBD Syndicate and AKA pictures’ Clayton Young. Ricky Tollman is co-producing.
AKA pictures – a subsidiary of Benaroya Pictures – is co-financing Big Sky. Having finished Warner Bros’ The Familymoon with Adam Sandler and Drew Berrymore earlier this summer, Thorne is next set for Disney’s Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.
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.
