Hindi
‘Tran Eka Tran’ wins best student film award at Twilight ’08
MUMBAI: Twilight 2008, which was held as part of the Delhi International Arts Festival, gave away the best student film award to Tran Eka Tran by Ashtha Gohil while Murli Manohar got the best director award for Karan Motcham. Antaral by Ujjwal Utkarsh received a special mention.
The Last Act by Madhavi Tangella of SRFTI (Kolkata) got the screenplay award while The Last Board by N Sundar received special mention in the screenplay category. Trip, by Emannuel Quindo Palo of FTII, Pune, bagged the best script award. In Transit by Arunima Sharma from FTII, Pune, won a special mention for script and also swept the best camera and sound award.
Priyanka Chhabra of the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad won two awards. Her film The Furnished Room got the editing award while Say No To Plastics got a special mention in the animation category. Solo by Anjali Nayar of NID, Ahmedabad, was adjudged the best animation film.
In the Professional’s category, the best screenplay (Fiction) award was given to Jugal Kishore Tayal who made his film Best Friend’s Promise with a handycam. The film has been produced by Dark Wizard.
The screenplay award for animation went to H2O by Nilesh Nevgi for SCNN Production. Sujan Bandhu – a Day with a Boatman by Viplab Majumdar received the best script award for a documentary. In the professional awards, there was special mention of a biographical film on Lenin by Arunava Ganguly.
The Professional category awards were given away by filmmaker Shyam Benegal while the Students’ awards were presented by senior script-writer and filmmaker Anurag Kashyap in the presence of film critic Aruna Vasudev who was the Chief Guest. The jury members who included Madan Gopal Singh, Gargi Sen, Namrata Joshi and Amit Sengupta.
Twilight was held at the India Islamic Cultural Centre and the Alliance Francaise, showcasing around 60 short films made by students and budding filmmakers from India.
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.
