Hindi
Slumdog Millionaire, Benjamin Button lead Bafta nominees
MUMBAI: Slumdog Millionaire and The Curious Case of benjamin Button have each picked up 11 Bafta nominations in the UK including for picture and director.
The Orange British Academy Film Awards will be presented 8 February 2009 at the Royal Opera House in London.
Frost/Nixon, Milk and The Reader have also been nominated for best picture. The Dark Knight picked up nine nominations. However eight of them were in technical categories. In the main categories only, the late Heath Ledger has been nominated. The stars of Slumdog Millionaire Dev Patel and Freida Pinto have also been nominated. Brad Pitt is a double nominee, picking up nominations for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Burn After Reading.
Kate Winslet is another double nominee for Revolutionary Road and The Reader. Clint Eastwood‘s film Changeling which has just been released in India has managed to get eight nominations. Frost/Nixon and The Reader have six and five nominations, respectively.
The best actor race will see Patel and Pitt face off with Frank Langella for Frost/Nixon Sean Penn for Milk and Mickey Rourke for The Wrestler.
Winslet is up against Meryl Streep for Doubt, Angelina Jolie in Changeling and Kristin Scott Thomas for I‘ve Loved You So Long. This is the second time that Winslet has received two best actress Bafta nominations in the same year, having been shortlisted in 2005 for Finding Neverland and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Ledger and Pitt are joined in the supporting actor category by Philip Seymour Hoffman Doubt, Robert Downey Jr. Tropic Thunder and Brendan Gleeson In Bruges.
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.
