Hindi
Whoever wins the Oscar, Kodak gets laurels
NEW DELHI: Irrespective of which film wins the Oscar this year for Best Picture, it will be an accolade for Kodak Film since all the film nominees have been produced on Kodak film.
This is for the 80th consecutive year – ever since the inception of the Academy Awards – that the Oscar for Best Picture will go to a Kodak movie.
The feature films nominated in 2008 for an Academy Award for Best Picture are Atonement, Juno, Michael Clayton, No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood.
The five cinematographers nominated for Oscars this year also chose to use Kodak colour negative films. Contenders in this year‘s Cinematography category are: Roger Deakins (The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford and No Country for Old Men), Robert Elswit (There Will Be Blood), Janusz Kaminski (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) and Seamus McGarvey (Atonement).
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will recognise Kodak‘s commitment to innovation this year with an Oscar statuette for the development of photographic emulsion technologies incorporated into the Kodak VISION2 family of colour negative films. This is the ninth Oscar that Kodak has earned for scientific and technical excellence and service to the motion picture industry.
“The VISION2 film platform and our recently-launched VISION3 films are the benchmark in the motion picture industry for image capture efficiency,” said Kodak‘s Film, Photofinishing and Entertainment Group President and Eastman Kodak Company EVP Mary Jane Hellyar.
Kodak‘s connection to the motion picture industry dates back to 1889, during the dawn of the industry, when Thomas Edison asked Kodak founder George Eastman if he could provide film for his experimental motion picture camera and projector. Kodak continues to work with customers worldwide to help them bring their stories to life.
The 80th Annual Academy Awards will be held on 24 February at Kodak Theatre, which is now home to the annual Academy Awards ceremonies.
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.
