Hindi
Indian documentaries to screen at IDFA filmfest in Amsterdam
NEW DELHI: Three Indian documentaries will be screened at the International Documentary Film Festival that will be held in Amsterdam from 20 November to 1 December.
Menstrual Man by Amit Virmani and Powerless or Katiyabaaz by Fahad Mustafa and Deepti Kakkar will screen under the Reflecting Images: Best of Fests section; and My Name is Salt by Farida Pacha will compete in the IDFA Competition for First Appearance section.
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Amit Virmani’s Menstrual Man is a Singapore – India production. Arunachalam Muruganantham is considered a madman in his village for he has achieved a feat that is considered to be pervert by his community. He has devised a manually operated machine to make low-cost sanitary pads. The napkins are made by and for rural Indian women. The film made its Canadian Premiere at the HotDocs, the Canadian International Documentary Film Festival in Toronto this year.
Powerless or Katiyabaaz traces the city of Kanpur that has 15-hour power cuts. Hundreds of people steal electricity, amidst high risks, to meet their needs. The real trouble starts with the entry of the first female chief of the electricity company who vows to wipe out all illegal connections. Powerless has been one of the most talked about documentaries of the year. The film premiered at Berlinale Forum and competed at the Tribeca Film Festival 2013.
My Name is Salt is a documentary on the salt families of India. Every year the monsoon turns the desert into sea, washing away the salt fields. Thousands of families move to the desert for eight months to extract salt from the earth. Farida Pacha’s The Women in Blue Berets was screened at Open Frame 2012, organised by the Public Service Broadcasting Trust (PSBT) in collaboration with the India International Centre, New Delhi.
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.
