Hindi
Bengali film’s box office collections in Mumbai
MUMBAI: Satya Pictures‘ latest Bengali film Bhooter Bhobishyot, released along with The Avengers and Tezz, has had a decent run at the box office in the four screens across Mumbai that it was made available in.
In a week‘s run, the film has grossed Rs 35,000 per screen, according to trade circles.
Showing the problem of urban displacement, of old houses crumbling to the might of high rises, malls and multiplexes, the film is told through the predicament of resident ghosts.
The film begins with Ayan Sengupta, an ad film director, aspiring to start a feature film and is in search of a good plot. He comes to a haunted mansion, the Chowdhury Palace, to shoot for his upcoming commercial ad film. There he meets Biplab who suggests him a story about ghosts who live together and face the difficulties they have to face in finding a place to live in since all the old buildings are being demolished by real estate developers.
He relates the story of the ghosts in the old mansion and the problem the ghosts faced when a developer wanted to turn it into a shopping mall and how the ghosts solved it.
The film, with its references to caste, communalism, consumerism, urbanisation, love and revolution, takes pot shots at various issues without becoming preachy.
Incidentally, the film, in its seventh week run in Kolkata showing in about 22 theatres has lapped up Rs 36 million in box office revenues.
The producers believe that its collections will soon cross Rs 50 million
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.
