Hindi
UTV World Movies ties up with Shemaroo
MUMBAI: UTV World Movies has tied up with Shemaroo World Cinema, for releasing its library titles in the Indian home video market.
Through this strategic partnership, UTV World Movies takes another step towards making contemporary, award winning World Cinema available across several platforms.
UTV World Movies has a library of over 600 titles from over 40 countries spread across languages and genres comprising Oscar winning and nominated titles such as The Lives of Others, Divided We Fall and The Counterfeiters. It also has Oscar nominated and other award winning films like Waltz With Bashir, Machuca, Your Name Is Justine and The House of Flying Daggers.
Shemaroo World Cinema has a collection of titles of several renowned film makers like Jean-Luc Godard, Akira Kurosawa, Pedro Almodóvar, Roman Polanski, and Claude Chabrol, among many others.
Through its association with Shemaroo World Cinema, UTV World Movies would release Oscar winning titles like The Mission and A Room With A View. The collection is slated to hit the Indian market by April 2009.
UTV Global Broadcasting executive director Shantonu Aditya says “After successfully launching India‘s first world cinema channel across cable and DTH platforms in the country, we are very pleased to expand our content delivery model to include home video and are confident of the combined strength of our content along with Shemaroo‘s acumen in the home video segment.”
Shemaroo Entertainment director Hiren Gada says, “After receiving a good response for our Shemaroo World Cinema initiative recently, we are delighted to enhance our catalogue, with that of UTV World Movies. With UTV World Movies appealing collections, and our strong distribution network and wide product presence across the home video platform, we are certain that we will be able to optimise and create a product presence. The common objective of our collaboration is to grow the World Cinema market and create mature audiences.”
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.
