Hindi
Bollywood to actively participate in Miff 2008
MUMBAI: Mumbai International Film Festival (Miff) 2008 which starts on 3 February, will be different this year.Though the festival is related to documentary, short and animation films, it will see active participation from stalwarts of the Hindi film industry.
Miff 2008 festival director and Film Division chief producer Kuldeep Sinha says, ‘‘For the first time Bollywood is participating in the festival in a big way.‘‘
Noted director, producer and writer Basu Chatterjee will inaugurate the ‘Homage‘ section, which will screen memorable movies of filmmakers like K Vishwanath, Girish Vaidya and noted cinematographer KK Mahajan, Sinha informed.
Renowned director Jahnu Barua and Jabbar Patel will be present at the inauguration of ‘Glimpses of Films Division‘, which will showcase selected movies made by the directors of Film Division on the entire spectrum of development in India since 1948.
Special package of ‘International Students Films‘ from Whistling Woods will be inaugurated by the Showman of Bollywood Subhash Ghai.
This package will screen the films shown at Pune International Film Festival 2008 as part of the International Students Film Competition.
Films from SAARC countries will be inaugurated by director and producer Mahesh Bhatt while the special package on the legends of cinema called the ‘Film Memoirs‘ will be inaugurated by Yash Chopra, Sinha added.
Governor of Jammu and Kashmir Lt Gen (Retd) SK Sinha will inaugurate the ‘Retrospective‘ on 4 February, where special films on the Second World War will be showcased.
While the inauguration of the ‘Homage‘, ‘Glimpses of Film Division‘ and the student‘s films from Whistling Woods will be on 4 February, films from SAARC countries and ‘Film Memoirs‘ will be inaugurated on 5 February, a release said.
Miff 2008 will have separate sections of films from the SAARC countries, South Africa, and Brazil.
There will be a section called ‘Best of Festivals’ for selected films from some renowned documentary, short and animation film festivals and Oscar winning and nominated films, a retrospective of films by jury members, a section of Classics featuring films of great masters of documentary films which will have movies made by Great Masters like Bert Haanstra, Robert J. Flaherty, Francois Truffaut, Istvan Szabo, Kristof Zanussi and Ritwik Ghatak. This package will be organized with the support of National Film Archive of India.
A Film Memoir shows biographical films made on great filmmakers like Andrei Tarkovsky, Ingmar Bergman, Satyajit Ray, and Bimal Roy, while Adult Cartoons is a collection of animation films made for adult viewers by the National Film Board of Canada.
There is a special and rarely seen section on films on the Second World War with rarest film records of the Indian troops in action at various part of the world during Second World War. This will also feature the battle of Britain , Russia and other major incidents of that period. This package is being organized with the help of the Armed Forces Film & Photo Division, Delhi.
There will also be sections for films from the North East and from Jammu and Kashmir, and Glimpses from the archives of the Division, apart from homage to filmmakers who passed away in the recent past.
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.
