Hindi
UTV to launch World Movies titles on home video
MUMBAI: UTV has announced that it is launching titles from its World Movies catalogue on home video in May.
UTV Motion Pictures says that it has got a varied catalogue of titles whose telecast rights have been acquired directly from the sole distributors of the films. The company says that its home distribution network in the metros, mini metros and class-1 towns in India reaches close to one million towns across the country.
The UTV Home Video division distributes its own movies – big Bollywood blockbusters, as well as Hollywood content.
UTV Entertainment Television CEO Shantonu Aditya says, “As a strong company philosophy, we have always believed in retaining our intellectual property rights as this makes us valued content custodians. We are very positive on the tremendous scope and growth prospects of this business and we know that this business model would drive our revenues significantly. We are going to provide value for money to Indian viewers as they get to see original versions of some of the most entertaining and recent box-office hits from around the world.”
World Movies has a library of over 500 titles including blockbuster hits and award winners across film festivals from around the world including the Oscars. Almost 50 per cent of these titles are available on DVD. Some of these titles include the Spanish film Buenos Aires 1977 that was nominated for the Golden Palm at Cannes in 2006; the new Carlos Saura musical Fados, La Zona – award winner at the Toronto International Film Festival and the Venice Film Festival; and Pierre Salvadori‘s comedy Priceless, a movie that ably demonstrates that if money cannot buy love, it sure can purchase lots of obsequious service from four-star hotel staffers and costly goodies from laughably pricey boutiques!
UTV adds that with several players in the market fighting for larger mind share of audiences, home video is at a significant stage in India with a lot of scope for penetration. Products are being offered at much lower costs to beat competition and exploitation is rampant after each theatrical release. The hardware costs of the DVDs are also getting lower.
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.
