Hindi
Palador’s world film library to be available on Tata Sky
MUMBAI: Palador Pictures has announced a tie up with Tata Sky under which they can show nearly 1000 World Cinema titles on the direct-to-home (DTH) service provider‘s pay-per-view service Showtime.
Starting 12 October, Tata Sky has lined up eight movies from Palador‘s library for the coming five weeks which subscribers can order once and watch it multiple times till midnight.
Some of these films are Akira Kurosawa‘s Seven Samurai and Throne of Blood, Jim Jarmusch‘s Dead Man and Coffee and Cigarettes, Wong-Kar Wai‘s In The Mood For Love. Titles also include American, European and Asian films.
Every week, Tata Sky will replace the films with a new set from the Palador library.
Palador Pictures founder and MD Gautam Sikhnis said, “We have worked hard to create a collection of the best-of-the-best movies from across the world and are currently nurturing around 1000 titles in our ever-growing library. And now, the task of taking them to the discerning Indian viewers is made easy with Tata Sky satellite television service. We promise a future of the best of World Cinema to every Tata Sky subscriber.”
According to an official statement, Palador Pictures invested over $4 million (Rs 160 million) to acquire legal rights to nearly 1,000 English and foreign language film titles in the World Cinema category.
Tata Sky Ltd CEO and MD Vikram Kaushik said, “Our tie-up with Palador enables us to introduce our subscribers to classics in the World Cinema category made by legendary film makers. These films will be available in DVD quality picture and will have only one ad-break thereby enhancing the viewing experience for our subscribers.”
The Palador catalogue also boasts of classics directed by the masters of yesteryears and the current crop of mavericks: Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Akira Kurosawa, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Abbas Kiarostami, David Lynch and many more.
Earlier, Palador had UTV announced their divorce for a world cinema movie channel project.
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.
