Hindi
3000 apply to audition for UAE-based Bollywood film Dollars
MUMBAI: The recently announced UAE-based Bollywood production Dollars has gone in for an open casting for its nine roles and characters on 5 April at the Light House Studios in Al Quoz, Dubai.
"We are looking for nine main and several supplementary characters of various nationalities which is reflective of the UAE landscape. And since the story is based in the UAE, actors selected from within the resident pool will add to the believability factor of the characters and result in a more authentic end product," said director Sameer Khan.
Surprisingly, the production house initially received more than 3000 portfolios and applications from UAE residents since their online announcement of the casting. From among the lot 280 applicants have been shortlisted.
Candidates selected from the first round will be combined with the shortlisted 280 for the screen test in second round.
The film, that is set to hit the floors by May this year, is a tale of two friends who arrive in Dubai to work and their fast paced action adventure thereof.
Dollars is a UAE based production and will be majorly shot in the UAE with some parts in India.
The film is being produced by Times Square Entertainment and Ashwini Sehdev .Vikram Chopra is the film‘s associate producer and Neelesh Mishra has written the script and screenplay.
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.
