Hindi
MAMI’s 10th International Film Festival to screen 140 films
MUMBAI: The tenth edition of the Mumbai Academy of the Moving Image‘s (MAMI) International Film Festival will kick off on 6 March. Presented by Reliance Big Entertainment, the festival will screen 140 films from 45 countries.
This year, the festival has introduced a Global Lifetime Achievement Award, which will be given to an international director for his/her contribution to the world cinema.
The festival is also introducing a short film competition called “Dimensions Mumbai,” for which digital films of five minutes‘ durations depicting various aspects of life in Mumbai are being invited. The age of the participants should be 25 years or less. The best entry would be awarded a cash prize of Rs 150,000, initiated by Jaya Bachchan, who is also one of the trustees of MAMI.
The opening gala night will mark the screening of Polish master Andrzej Wajda‘s latest film Katyn, nominated for an Oscar in the foreign film category. Premiered at the 58th Berlin Film Festival, Katyn will now witness the grand Asian premiere of the film.
On the closing gala night, The Mourning Forest, a Japanese film that won the Grand Prix at the 60th edition of Cannes Film Festival in 2007, will be screened.
The Global Lifetime Achievement Award will be conferred on the Spanish director Carlos Saura, for his outstanding contribution to cinema. Saura is the filmmaker in focus whose eight films including Carmen will be screened at the festival.
The Lifetime Achievement Award will be given to Dharmendra and Rishi Kapoor will be honoured with the Award for Significant Contribution to Cinema over 25 years while lyricist Gulzar will receive an Award for Outstanding Contribution to Indian Film Music and Hitendra Ghosh will be presented with the Kodak Award for Technical Excellence.
The festival will have a special screening of To Each of His Own Cinema, a film made by 25 world-renowned directors to celebrate 60 years of Cannes Festival in 2007.
It will feature retrospective of Ritwik Ghatak and Andrzej Wajda, whose film Kanal is celebrating its 50th year.
The Italian silent film Pinocchio (1911) restored by Cineteca will be another attraction of the festival. The film, based on Collodi‘s famous novel, will be screened with live music. The screening is sponsored by the Italian Consulate of Mumbai.
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.
