Hindi
NDTV Lumiere, Excel release six world cinema titles on DVD
MUMBAI: NDTV Lumiere and Excel Home Videos have released world titles namely Short Sharp Shock (German), Crossed Tracks (French), Playtime (1967) (French), Mr. Hulot’s Holiday (1953) (French), Jour De Fete (1953) (French) and Mon Uncle (1958) (French) on DVD. The DVDs are priced at Rs 499.
German director Fatih Akin’s debut film Short Sharp Shock is a ghetto-centric gangster movie, depicting the gritty story of three men whose friendship is put to test on the mean streets of the city.
Claude Lelouch’s Crossed Tracks won the Cesar Awards 2008 and was screened at festival de Cannes 2008, The Copenhagen International film festival 2007 and The Palm Springs International Film Awards 2008. Crossed Tracks, a romantic thriller, is a taut and tense journey of suspense and second-guessing filled to the brim with red herrings and false endings.
French filmmaker Jacque Tati’s fourth film, Playtime, won the 1969 Bodil Award for Best European Film. Playtime depicts Paris a soulless concrete jungle where Monsieur Hulot has to contact an American official in Paris, but he gets lost in the maze of modern architecture which is filled with the latest technical gadgets. Caught in the tourist invasion, Hulot roams around Paris with a group of American tourists, causing chaos in his usual manner.
Considered by many to be Jacques Tati’s funniest film, Mr. Hulot’s Holiday was nominated for an Oscar for best writing, story and screenplay in 1956, and won the Prix Louis Delluc, France’s highest film award, in 1953.
Jacques Tati’s first feature film, Jour De Fete, was nominated for the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival (1949). A silent comedy film set in the French countryside, it casts a look at the modern day obsession with speed and efficiency.
Jacques Tati’s third feature Mon Uncle has won multiple awards including the Prix Special Du Jury at the Festival de Cannes, the New York Critics Circle Award for Best Foreign Film and the 1959 Oscar for Best Foreign Film. This comedy centers around a dimwitted yet lovable character of Monsieur Hulot and his quixotic struggle with postwar France‘s infatuation with modern architecture, mechanical efficiency and American-style consumerism.
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.
