Hindi
Osian to honour Mrinal Sen with lifetime achievement award
NEW DELHI: The Osian‘s-Cinefan Festival of Asian and Arab Cinema is set to give away the Lifetime Achievement Award for Contribution to Cinema, a newly introduced category, to filmmaker Mrinal Sen.
The writer’s award, renamed as the Aruna Vasudev Lifetime Achievement Award for writing on cinema, will be conferred on Jose “Pete” F. Lacaba from the Philippines.
The awards will be presented during the Festival, held in New Delhi from 10 to 20 July 2008.
Around 200 feature and short fiction films from around 40 countries are to be screened at this year’s Osian‘s-Cinefan Festival of Asian and Arab Cinema.
Addressing a press meet here today, Osian’s Connoisseurs of Art Chairman Neville Tuli announced that the award money this year would be approximately $ 250, 000 for the competition sections and lifetime achievement awards. The winners of the Lifetime Achievement Award will be presented Rs. 800,000 each.
The Best Films in the Asian-Arab and Indian Competition sections will be awarded Rs two million each and the best director in each section will win Rs 800,000.
The special jury award and the best actor and actress will each take away Rs 200,000. The best first feature will receive Rs 200,000 in addition to a guaranteed support of Rs 800,000 from FOOD: The Film Fund – Osian‘s Originating Development, created by Osian‘s, for the next feature film.
An Audience Award is also being set up for a film in competition and will win Rs 200,000.
The new competition section dealing with themes of In-Tolerance has been created this year to showcase feature and documentary films that respond to or deal with the intolerance of our times. The best film in this category will take home a cash award of Rs 800,000.
Indonesian actress and producer Christine Hakim will preside over the international jury of the forthcoming 10th Osian’s-Cinefan Festival of Asian and Arab Cinema next month. The Indian members of the juries are: Ketan Mehta, Sai Paranjpye, Nagesh Kukunoor, Bappaditya Bandopadhyay, Arun Khopkar and Meena Karnik.
The event will also unveil the scale model of the Osianama, Osian’s flagship cultural complex. The seven-section Osianama, which will open in Mumbai in mid-2009, will house two screens apart from a debating house for discussion on cinema.
In addition, it will have Osian’s film house, archives and offices for its other activities.
Furthermore, Latika Padgaonkar and Indu Shrikent have taken over the realms of the festival in Delhi with its director Aruna Vasudev, founder of the festival in 1999, deciding to step down.
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.
