Hindi
‘Baahubali’ & ‘Ennu Ninte Moideen’ win big at IIFA Utsavam Awards 2016
MUMBAI: The IIFA Utsavam Awards 2016, which celebrates South Indian cinema, saw the coming together of the stars from the Tamil and Malayalam Film Industries on 24 January.
The first day saw the Tamil and Malayalam film industries being felicitated. In the Tamil Film Awards, Baahubali-The Beginning took home the highest number of accolades with a total tally of six awards including Best Picture, Direction, Supporting Role (Male), Supporting Role (Female), Playback Singer (Male) and Playback Singer (Female).
For the Malyalam Film Awards, Ennu Ninte Moideen also took home the highest number of awards with a total tally of six awards including Best Picture, Leading Role (Male), Leading Role (Female), Supporting Role (Female) and Playback Singer (Female).
Jayam Ravi won the award for Leading Role (Male) for his performance in Thani Oruvan (Tamil), while Nayanthara walked away with the award for Leading Role (Female) for May (Tamil). Prithviraj Sukumaran and Parvathi Menon won Best Actor and Best Actress for their film Ennu Ninte Moideen.
The evening also saw performances by Kavya Madhavan, Shriya Saran, Adah Sharma, Tapsee Pannu, Mamta Mohandas, Nikki Galrani and Bharath.
The awards will be telecast on Sun TV.
Sun TV Network network programming head S.J. Clement said, “Sun TV Network is proud to be associated with the premiere edition of IIFA Utsavam 2015, a pioneering event that will present the finest among the South Indian film fraternity. Sun TV Network reaches around 58 million households in the country. Increasingly, our programming is being accessed by the South Indian diaspora across the globe. We believe in delivering consistently high quality entertainment through our unrelenting focus on premium content. Our collaboration with IIFA reiterates our commitment to be at the leading edge of broadcast media industry.”
Wizcraft International Entertainment director Andre Timmins said, “We are thrilled at the phenomenal success of the very first edition of IIFA Utsavam. There have been a lot of challenged we have had to overcome including the tragedy in Chennai. We are honoured to be able to help the city of Chennai get back on its feet through IIFA Utsavam. It is an honour to felicitate so many deserving individuals on their talent and hard work in the year gone by and we wish all the winners tonight the very best.”
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.
