Hindi
Mahindra Indo American Arts Council Film Festival honours Indians
MUMBAI: The Mahindra Indo-American Arts Council Film Festival culminated its five-day long festival of screenings and events.
The winners for the eight award categories were announced at the Awards Ceremony, following the red carpet premiere of The Last Lear at the Asia Society.
The MIAAC Film Festival screened 50 films which spotlighted the established and emerging South Asian independent filmmakers.
The festival which included films from several countries including India, Kuwait, France, United Kingdom, USA and Canada also saw a red-carpet screening of Sanjay Leela Bhansali‘s Saawariya.
A key initiative of this year‘s festival was ‘Script Link‘, a two day program designed to foster relationships between the film industry executives and 14 writers of South Asian descent.
This first edition of Script Link provided the selected writers the opportunity to interact with potential investors, development executives, producers and agents such as Sony Pictures Classics, Magnolia Pictures and GreenStreet Films in over 200 meetings.
Following are the eight awards and the winners:
- Chandrika Tandon Best Film Award: Manorama Six Feet Under directed by Navdeep Singh.
- Indira Mahindra Best Director Award: Rituparno Ghosh for Dosar.
- Nationwide Actor Award: Danny Denzongpa for Frozen
- Dina Kothari Best Actress Award: Konkana Sen Sharma for Dosar.
- Analog Digital Inc. Best Documentary Award: India Untouched directed by Stalin K.
- Metropolis Film Lab Best Short Award: Shanu Taxi directed by Vasant Nath.
- Verizon People‘s Choice Award: Verizon presented the People‘s Choice Award to Love Story by Amit Gupta.
- The Best Film Jury decided to give a special mention and award to Frozen directed by Shivajee Chandrabhushan.
In addition to the cash awards, Time Warner Cable presented each of the winners Award Certificates for 24 free movies each on BODVOD, the South Asian channel.
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.
