Hindi
14th Mumbai film fest from 18 to 25 October
MUMBAI: The eagerly awaited 14th Mumbai Film Festival, Academy of Moving Image (MAMI) and Reliance Entertainment initiative will be held from 18 to 25 October.
The festival will be held in the south of Mumbai, heart of the City with NCPA and INOX as the festival venue. This development comes with growing demand from cinema enthusiasts to accommodate them in larger number, thereby expand the cinematic and cultural threshold and enrich their film festival experience.
To celebrate 100 years of Indian Cinema, Mumbai Film Festival has introduced a Competition section called “India Gold 2012” for Indian films with a cumulative cash reward of Rs 15 Lakh.
The Festival will pay tribute to Italian Cinema through a special selection of films in the Celebration of Italian Cinema, organized in collaboration with the Embassy of Italy in India and Mr. Italo Spinelli.
The package will include films from all major directors. Restored Italian classics ‘Maciste‘ (1915) and ‘Inferno‘ (1911) will form part of the package of restored world classics that will be screened during the Mumbai Film Festival.
Nine silent movies will be screened with live music at the 14th Mumbai Film Festival in order to celebrate 100 years of Indian cinema and to bring back the era of silent cinema. This will give the audience an idea of what early Indian cinema was like.
In addition to screening the best of World cinema to foster a climate of good cinema, the 14th Mumbai Film Festival aims to scale up its Film Market, the Mumbai Film Mart this year.
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.
