Hindi
VRFF kicks off film financing with Manmohan Shetty’s Victory
MUMBAI: Vistaar Religare Film Fund (VRFF), India‘s first film fund to be approved by Sebi (Securities and Exchange Board of India), has started the ball rolling. Its maiden film financing project: Manmohan Shetty‘s Victory.
The nature of the funding is unique in the sense that VRFF has agreed to invest only in the cost required for print and advertising (P&A) promotion. Shetty‘s Walk Water Media will receive a funding of approximately $1 million from VRFF for the movie Victory.
Says Walk Water Media chairman Manmohan Shetty, “This is a landmark deal as it is happening in India for the first time that a third party is putting in the money for P&A. The industry is in urgent need of entities that will recognise the depth of talent available in the country and work methodically to produce superlative cinema. We believe that this is the beginning of a long and fruitful association with Vistaar Religare Film Fund and we are confident that we will work together on future ventures as well.”
The big budget film, featuring Harman Baweja and Amrita Rao as lead protagonists, will release on 30 January.
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.
