Hindi
NFDC submits Shanmugam’s $2.5 mn film to Cannes
MUMBAI: National Film Development Corporation of India (NFDC) will be submitting Parthiban Shanmugam‘s You‘re Rejected to Cannes as India‘s entry.
Apart from directing it, Shanmugam, a versatile writer and director of Indian origin, is also producing the film with a budget of $2.5 million.
“The film revolves around George, a self-appointed soldier of Christ, who has embarked on a tortured personal quest to investigate lifestyles that disgust him and that he regards as rejected by God. His interactions with a wide range of people reveal their struggles toward self-acceptance even as the investigations begin to erode George‘s defences against his own demons,” said Shanmugam.
You‘re Rejected, filmed in the Bible belt of Georgia, USA, is slated to release in 2009 during the US Presidential elections.
“The views of the Republican Presidential candidates‘ echo those of the film‘s lead character George who is conservative and provocative. Hence, we decided to release the film during the 2009 US elections,” says an official source.
The film spins around gay and lesbianism captured by the canvas of American conservatism, life style and existence.
“We don‘t know how the Indian censor board will see the film because from the beginning to end the film contains religious extremist views. However, our distributors are very eager to release the film in India,” the source adds.
Presidential candidates like senator Hillary Clinton, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, Chicago senator Barack Obama, Tennessee senator John Edwards, governor Mitt Romney, senator and actor Fred Thompson, Arizona senator John McCain, Delaware senator Joe Bidden from the opposite camps with different opinions about the gay issues, have become members in Parthiban‘s film site at MySpace.
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.
