Hindi
Moser Baer in DVD deal with Palador for 50 world cinema titles
MUMBAI: Moser Baer Entertainment, which earlier shook up the DVD and VCD market in the country with its aggressive pricing strategy, is now looking to target the premium end of the market.
Moser Baer has bought from Palador Pictures the rights to distribute and sell 50 foreign language film titles in DVD format through its over 2,000 key retail outlets across the country.
The foreign films being released in DVD include some of the most awarded and critically acclaimed films. Akira Kurosawa’s masterpieces ‘Seven Samurai’ & ‘Yojimbo’, ‘Infernal Affairs’ (which inspired Martin Scorsese’s Academy Award winner ‘Departed’), Wong-Kar Wai’s Cannes award winner ‘In The Mood for Love’, the cult Asian horror film ‘The Eye’, Ingmar Bergman’s masterpiece ‘Wild Strawberries’, Jim Jarmusch’s ‘Dead Man’ starring a young Johnny Depp and the mother of all monster movies – the original ‘Godzilla’, being some noted names. The DVDs are each priced at Rs 399. Moser Baer will reportedly be paying an advance royalty to Palador Films for distributing their content, amounting to nearly 40 per cent of expected revenues.
Harish Dayani, chief executive – Entertainment Business, Moser Baer said, “At less than Rs 400, we will bring the premium home video titles to the Indian consumer through this tie up with Palador Pictures. Imagine you can now legally own 10 Bergman classics or 10 Kurosawas in less than Rs 4,000! We hope that this alliance with Palador is only the beginning and that we can collaborate with Palador for more than these 50 titles in the future.”
Says Gautam Shiknis, founder & managing director of Palador Pictures, “This alliance is the beginning of a World Cinema movement in India. The tie-up with Moser Baer Entertainment will now allow Indians from across the country to legally own a Bergman or Kurosawa or any of the other masters and be suitably awed by their art, craft and wizardry over the cinematic medium. I sincerely hope this rejuvenates a cult kind of movement for World Cinema and foreign films in smaller cities in addition to the metros.”
Palador Pictures has invested over $ 4 million (Rs 160 million) to acquire legal rights to around 1,000 foreign language film titles in its World Cinema category. The Palador catalogue boasts of award-winning foreign film classics directed by the masters of yesteryears and the current crop of mavericks: Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Akira Kurosawa, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Jean-Luc Godard, Froncois Trauffat, Abbas Kiarostami, David Lynch and many more. The Palador collection covers all genres and eras and is probably the single largest collection of quality films in the world.
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.
