Hindi
Chakravyuh premiered at London Film Fest
MUMBAI: Prakash Jha‘s Chakravyuh was premiered at the 56th BFI London Film Festival on Friday. It was attended by the stars of the film.
Directed by Prakash Jha and starring Arjun Rampal, Abhay Deol and Manoj Bajpai, Chakravyuh is a political thriller highlighting the experience of India‘s Naxalite community.
On the sidelines of the premiere, Prakash Jha said his film‘s inclusion at the BFI London Film Festival was a matter of great pride. “I am extremely happy that the London Film Festival wanted to choose a popular Bollywood film for the festival and they decided to choose mine, which is in the popular genre, but is not really a populist Bollywood film,” he said in a statement.
“It felt that I am trying to tell this very serious story in a popular manner because it has songs, it has the big actors and a setting which is huge and it also has a cause. I‘m extremely happy that Chakravyuh has been accepted at the London Film Festival. It‘s great,” he added.
Said Abhay Deol of the film‘s director, “Prakash Jha – he prepares a lot which just makes the process easier. This was one of the easiest films to shoot and what I mean by that is it was so well prepped we could focus on our work. Prakash has his own fan following and he‘s an experienced filmmaker. He takes you to task before you shoot the film so that while you shoot the film you are free to focus on what you need to do.”
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.
