Hindi
6th Jagran Film Festival pays homage to director Ravi Chopra with ‘Baghban’
MUMBAI: The 6th Jagran Film Festival unfolded its day three with triple dose of movies, master classes and merriment. The atmosphere at Delhi’s Siri Fort Auditorium was infectious and lively with cine buffs being spoilt for choices with a wide variety of regional, Indian and international cinema.
The 2015 edition of Jagran Film Festival is travelling from Delhi to Kanpur, Lucknow, Allahabad, Varanasi, Agra, Meerut, Dehradun, Hisar, Ludhiana, Patna, Ranchi, Jamshedpur, Raipur, Indore, and Bhopal before culminating in Mumbai. In close collaboration with festival partners like Whistling Woods International (WWI), Film Federation of India (FFI) and Motion Picture Dist. Association (MPDA), the 2015 edition aims to set up 16 cinema appreciation workshops, 400 screenings in 17 cities.
Assamese film Aarohi under Indian Showcase opened day three’s line up, closely followed by the cult Hindi comedy drama Anand under the Happiness category and Baghban on another screen as homage to late director Ravi Chopra. Under the World Panorama category, the festival screened director Vera Glagoleva’s Russian film The Two Women and Ann Hui’s Mandarin film The Golden Era.
Film lovers had a hard time choosing between films such as a 1977 retro Hindi film Dulhan Wahi Joh Piya Mann Bhaye directed by Lekh Tandon, 1942 American classic Casablanca and the recent 2014 American hit Birdman under Country Focus. Several critically acclaimed Bengali cinema such as the 2015 films Asha Jaoar Majhe (Labour of Love) and Chotoder Chobi too were screened. A special screening of Zed Plus, a film by Chandra Prakash Dwivedi was presented by Adil Hussain along with Shooojit Sircar’s Piku.
Other films that spread cinematic delights on Day three include Harshavardhan Kulkarni’s raunchy film Hunterrr under Indian Showcase.
Master classes remained a buzzword throughout the day with a 70 minute screenwriting workshop with Anjum Rajabali that was loaded with insights on storytelling principles. From theme, premise, character, and plot, to structure, scene construction, and dialogue, and the use of music and song in Indian script, the workshop covered the entire journey of the script.
The class was followed by a candid chit chat and question-answer round with Rajabali followed by a panel discussion on Evaluating Cinema, which was moderated by Mayank Shekhar. Attendees included Kaveri Bamzai, Shubhra Gupta, Ajay Brahamtmaj and Mihir Pandya.
The much anticipated line up for this year’s Jagran Shorts category included English film Gen X 01, Bhojpuri film Gunjaa, Hindi films Hiroshima, Spanish film Ruperstre, Marathi film Vithya among others.
Evening saw the screening of handpicked films like Leftover and Your Heart At Random (French) along with two Korean films Hosanna and Minsu Kimin Wonderland. The 6th edition of the Jagran Film Festival, Delhi 2015 is scheduled from 1 to 5 July, 2015 at Siri Fort Auditorium, Delhi.
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.
