Hindi
‘The Lunchbox’, ‘Monsoon Shootout’ travelling to more festivals overseas
NEW DELHI: The Lunchbox directed by Ritesh Batra appears to be garnering much more attention than it would have got at the Oscars. The film has visited many international festivals and is set to go to two more soon.
The Lunchbox will compete at the 24th Stockholm Film Festival being held from 6 to 17 November, and at the American Film Institute Festival from 7 to 14 November.
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Amit Kumar’s Monsoon Shootout and Remo D’Souza’s Any Body Can Dance (ABCD) will screen under the Asian Images section in Stockholm.
The Lunchbox, making its Nordic Premiere at the festival, will compete with films like Paul Wright’s For Those in Peril, Anthony Chen’s Ilo Ilo and Amat Escalante’s Heli. The section showcases directors making their first, second or third feature film. .
Monsoon Shootout has earlier been screened at Cannes, Durban, Sydney, Jerusalem and London Indian Film Festivals. Remo D’Souza’s Any Body Can Dance (ABCD) is a 3D dance film directed and choreographed by Remo D’Souza and produced by UTV.
Meanwhile, a total of 32 titles will be screened in the World Cinema section of the AFI. The complete programme includes 119 films (83 features, 36 shorts) from 43 countries.
The Lunchbox, featuring Irrfan Khan, Nimrat Kaur and Nawazuddin Siddiqui, had its world premiere at the International Critics’ Week of the Cannes Film Festival and has since travelled to several important festivals including Telluride, Toronto, Karlovy Vary, Zurich and BFI London.
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.
