Hindi
Reliance ADA, Spielberg to start a $1.5 bn company
MUMBAI: Reliance ADA Group has signed a deal with DreamWorks SKG to start a new $1.5 billion company, completing Steven Spielberg‘s exit from Paramount Pictures and providing Indian billionaire Anil Ambani a foothold in Hollywood.
The deal is expected to finance a minimum slate of 32 movies over six years, says a source in Reliance. “The $1.5 billion amount is being raised through a mix of equity and debt,” he adds.
Reliance will pump in $550 million as equity investment while JPMorgan Chase & Co. will lead the debt financing.
When contacted, Reliance Big Entertainment president Rajesh Sawhney refused to offer his comments.
Meanwhile, Paramount said in a statement it will let Spielberg and DreamWorks chief Stacey Snider join the new company immediately.
Reliance had earlier announced it would produce a slate of 69 movies in nine languages over two years. The list included developing and co-producing movies with Hollywood stars George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Tom Hanks, Jay Roach, Nicholas Cage and Chris Columbus.
“It is a big step for Reliance which has already lined up a rich slate of Bollywood films. Hollywood, after all, dominates the film business across the world. Reliance already has a strong presence in the multiplex and FM radio business and plans to enter the broadcasting arena by the year-end,” says an analyst who tracks the company.
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.
