Hindi
Fashion‘s in-film ads fetch Rs 90 million
MUMBAI: Fashion, co-produced by UTV and Madhur Bhandarkar, has garnered Rs 90 million from in-film advertisements and co-promotions alone.
“We have got close to Rs 90 million from in-film endorsements and co-branding. This is a substantial amount as the production cost of the movie is around Rs 180-200 million,” UTV Motion Pictures director Siddhartha Roy Kapur tells Indiantelevision.com.
The brands include Kimaya, Lenovo, Reebok and Sunsilk.
UTV Motion Pictures is also planning to go heavy on promoting the film. Says Kapur, “The promotional costs will be 40-50 per cent of the amount that we have spent on producing the movie. We will be promoting Fashion in print as well as the TV medium.”
The company is also set to release Fashion across 750 theaters worldwide. To tap more viewers during the festival time, Fashion will be released on Wednesday (29 October) across 630 screens nationwide.
Says Kapur, “With the Diwali festival around, we get a long extended weekend. So we have decided to release the film on a Wednesday.”
The movie will be released soon after in another 120 screens across 16 countries. Fashion will be screened on 30 October in US and the Middle East while the other international markets will be able to watch the movie from 31 October.
Apart from theatrical release, the film will see multiple premieres and screenings. On 24 October, Fashion will be premiered at the South Asian International Film Festival in New York. This will be followed by promotions held by the Citibank NRI division inviting their clients for select Fashion screenings on 29 October across six US cities – New York, New Jersey, Houston, Dallas, San Francisco and Chicago.
Besides, Dubai will host the ‘Fashion Red Carpet Premiere‘ on 29 October, in association with Star TV Middle East.
Australia and New Zealand will host the ‘Fashion Nights‘ contest across five cities – Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Brisbane and Auckland – wherein the winners, crowned as Ms ‘Fashion Australia‘, will be rewarded with certificates attested by director Madhur Bhandarkar and Priyanka Chopra.
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.
