Hindi
Sparrow to open 10th Osian’s-Cinefan Festival
NEW DELHI: The 10th Osian‘s-Cinefan Festival of Asian and Arab Cinema, which begins on 10 July, will open with the Hong Kong film Sparrow while it will close with India‘s Mumbai Cutting.
The festival is being held at Siri Fort complex and Alliance Francaise in New Delhi and will end on 20 July.
Directed by Johnny To, Sparrow stars Simon Yam, Kelly Lin, Ka Tung Lam, Hoi-Pang Lo and Kenneth Cheung.
Sparrow, a slang in local Hong Kong street language for pickpocket, is about a “beautiful” woman and three professional pickpockets coming together in search of an elusive key. The film will be screened on 11 July at Siri Fort, Delhi.
“Like a sparrow, the camera swerves through the forgotten alleyways and old buildings intent to reveal something new…..For me, film has always been a medium that documents a specific place and time. Sparrow is an embodiment of that spirit,” said Johnnie To.
In the film Mumbai Cutting, ten Indian filmmakers, namely Sudhir Mishra, Jahnu Barua, Rahul Dholakia, Rituparno Ghosh, Shashanka Ghosh, Manish Jha, Anurag Kashyap, Ruchi Narain, Ayush Raina, Revathi and Kundan Shah, have collaborated to offer a glimpse of life in modern day Mumbai.
The film tells the story of a man and a woman who come together in grief after losing their loved ones, a writer who makes it his mission to connect with a troubled orphan, a Muslim woman attempting to procure a fake passport, and an aspiring actor who races through the streets in order to reach an important audition. The film will be screened on 19 July at Siri Fort.
Osian‘s-Cinefan is organised by Osian‘s Connoisseurs of Art in association with the government of Delhi.
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.
