Hindi
Turkish film bags top awards in fourth International Women’s film fest
NEW DELHI: The Turkish film ‘Istanbul My love‘ won the best film and best director award for Seckin Yasar at the 4th India International Women Film Festival which concluded here last night.
The film ‘Coffee House‘ by Gurbir Singh Grewal walked away with two awards: the best film in the ‘Male Voice‘ category, and the best actress Sakshi Tanwar.
‘Good Night‘ by Geetika Narang received the award for the best short feature, thus receiving a second award this month as it had won the Silver Lamp Tree Award of the Short Film Center of the International Film Festival of India in Panaji earlier this month.
The award for the best documentary went jointly to the American film ‘No! The Rape Documentary‘ by Aishah Shahidah Simons, and the Indian ‘Caravan‘ by Shazia Khan, while ‘Kashmakash‘ by Pragya Pallavi of India came in for special mention.
France was the focus country and a total of around 80 feature and short films from over 40 countries were screened in the Festival which opened with the film ‘Istanbul My Love‘ on 14 December.
The eight-day festival was aimed at encouraging women directors and on the theme “Women Behind the Camera”, relating to women empowerment, where women are being showcased not just as objects of visual pleasure but behind the camera.
Tributes were paid to seven Indian women filmmakers: Arundhati Devi, Manju Dey, Sai Paranjpye, Aparna Sen, Kalpana Lajmi, Vijaya Mehta and Prema Karanth.
The programme this year included Competition –World Cinema (Feature), Competition (Documentary), Indian Panorama, Retrospective, Kinder Films, Joint Hands, Focus Institute, Male Voice, and Short Films (Out of Competition).
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.
