Hindi
Palador ties up with retail outfits for DVD distribution
MUMBAI: Palador has joined hands with the organised retail chain stores Landmark, MusicWorld and Crossword, along with major standalone stores in Mumbai like Rhythm House and Granth to distribute DVDs of World Cinema.
Palador, which boasts of owning rights to over 1,000 films, now intends to independently release World Cinema titles from its collection. With this association in place, fans will now be able to get access to Palador’s titles at over 45 retail stores across India.
The seven films being released in DVD format include five classics from master filmmaker Ingmar Bergman – The Silence, Winter Light, Through A Glass Darkly, Summer With Monika and Music in Darkness – along with two contemporary titles End of Violence and Away with Words. The price of each DVD is kept at Rs 399.
Palador Pictures founder and MD Gautam Shiknis said, “Home video retail is a crucial part of our integrated plan to promote world cinema across all mediums available in the country today. Palador is pleased to announce the association with organised chain stores like Landmark, Musicworld and Crossword to retail its World Cinema titles across India. With this relationship onboard, we intend to release 50 titles subsequently during next quarter and henceforth, reaching sales figure of half a million copies by 2010.”
With tie-ups with Moser Baer and IndiaPlaza, Palador has already pumped over 40 World Cinema titles into the market. These films include Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai and Yojimbo, Infernal Affairs, Wong-Kar Wai’s In The Mood for Love, The Eye, Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, Dead Man and Godzilla.
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.
