Hindi
Indian investigative film nominated for Emmy awards
NEW DELHI: Indian journalist and documentary filmmaker Rohit Gandhi has been nominated for an Emmy award in the ‘Outstanding Investigative Journalism-Long form‘ category.
The nomination is for a film called Who cares about girls shot in different parts of India. It concentrates on the evil of child slavery. The story of the documentary revolves around not merely girls stuck in slavery but also those who have been able to break free and are fighting for others.
The Emmy’s award nominees were announced in New York late last week. Gandhi co-produced the film in collaboration with the National Geographic Film and Television, New York.
The film starts with a young girl selling spices in a street in front of Jama Masjid. It then takes us into the lives of two sisters that have been rescued from middle class homes where they were working as maids. The crew follows these girls as they get rehabilitated in a village.
One of the main characters of the film is a Nepalese girl who was a sex worker at the age of nine and now has become an activist, helping other girls get out of the flesh trade.
The journey takes the crew to a brothel in New Delhi where a 14-year-old is serving many customers. She is finally rescued from the brothel but she is able to get out of custody only after the police fails to file a detailed report about how the girl had been rescued.
Gandhi told indiantelevision.com that around the globe, over 200 million children are engaged in child labour, often doing the most brutal or degrading of jobs. Even in countries as wealthy as the United States, girls face harsh lives as victims of sex trafficking or as migrant workers.
This film is part of the on-going efforts of Gandhi to work in the area of child abuse. He had also produced a film on Child Brides this year that won the prestigious Edward Murrow award.
Gandhi also works as an international correspondent for the Canadian Broadcasting. He does a daily report out of India on a channel called Dex TV. He spent six years of his career at CNN and has covered news, conflicts and disasters in Afghanistan, Iraq, Nepal, Pakistan, India, Kuwait, Burma, China and Sri Lanka.
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.
