Hindi
Osian’s introduces ‘Short Cuts’ to facilitate short filmmakers
NEW DELHI: The Osian’s-Cinefan Festival of Asian and Arab Cinema has introduced a new section for short films called Short Cuts.
The section includes 43 short fiction films, short features and short movies from India, Pakistan, Germany, Egypt, Korea and other Asian and Arab countries.
With the introduction of this new section, many short fiction filmmakers are hopeful about the future of short films in India.
However,they are still concerned about their commercial viability and outlet as far as their reach to the masses is concerned.
“For a new filmmaker, directing a short film is a learning experience, a stepping stone to how making a full feature film would be”, said director of Pakistan‘s The Will Of Gurmukh Singh director Sharji Anwar Baloch.
This is for the first time that a private Indian film festival had given a platform to short filmmakers. Some of the filmmakers participating in the contest are still students at various film making schools like the Film and Television Institute of India and the Satyajit Ray FTII.
Commenting on the contribution of technology towards facilitating the making of short films, short filmmaker Vasanth Nath said, “Internet, because of its social networking features like video sharing and blogging, allows you to share the films with the small yet interested audience.”
Some of the short films that are to be screened at the ongoing festival include Karam Chawla‘s The Love Song of…, Atul Sabharwal‘s Midnight Lost and Found, Pierre Friquet‘s Snoozers,Spandan Banerjee‘s The Fiction and Gautam Baruah‘s Goodbye My Dear.
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.
