Hindi
Eastern Neighbours film festival to kick off on 6 November
MUMBAI: The first Eastern Neighbours film festival is scheduled from 6-9 November at Utrecht in the Netherlands. The film festival, with the aim to promote the films and culture of Eastern European countries, will showcase over 30 films.
The festival will have movies, short films, documentries and short-films from 14 different countries.
As per the film festival’s artistic director Rada Šešic, the intention if this festival is to showcase the region’s cinema, which is “modern in cinematic style and appealing for the world audience” while at the same time having kept its unique “Eastern European black humour” and “Eastern European sense of storytelling”; to allow the Dutch to get acquainted with its neighbours some of which have already joined the EU (Bulgaria and Romania) and some of which will in the future; and to broaden the Dutch audience’s “knowledge and mind about Muslims and their culture” through films from Balkan countries that have significant Muslim population, such as Bosnia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Albania, and Kosovo.
The films will be from Macedonia, Albania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, Turkey, Russia, Moldova and Belorussia. Some of the films to be screened are: Shadows, Upside Down, Magic Eye, Corridor#8, Das Fräulein and Plastic Jesus.
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.
