Hindi
Mrinal Sen, Pete Lacaba to receive lifetime achievement award
MUMBAI: The 10th Osian‘s-Cinefan Festival of Asian and Arab Cinema has announced the winners of the prestigious lifetime achievement awards.
While the Osian‘s lifetime achievement award for contribution to cinema is being awarded to Indian filmmaker Mrinal Sen, the Aruna Vasudev lifetime achievement award for writing on cinema will be conferred on Jose “Pete” F. Lacaba.
Mrinal Sen, a pioneer of the alternative cinema movement, is also a recipient of the Padma Bhushan and the Dadasaheb Phalke Award.
Jose F. Lacaba poet, journalist, editor, translator, and screenwriter, is a bilingual writer who writes both in English and Filipino. He is the author of six poetry collections in Filipino and a collection of journalistic reportage in English, Days of Disquiet and Nights of Rage.
The winners of the lifetime achievement ward will be presented with Rs 8,00,000 each.
Osian‘s Cinefan joint festival director said, “We are delighted to honour two eminent personalities from the world of cinema. Both have contributed in a seminal way to the seventh art and both have placed on their works an individual and creative stamp”.
The 10-day event, which begins on 10 July this year, will be held in New Delhi.
Also, a curtain raiser to the festival will be held in Mumbai on 13 and 14 June.
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.
