Hindi
Chaplin to open and Dhobi Ghat to close River to River Fest
MUMBAI: The Kiran Rao-directed Dhobi Ghat will be the closing film of the River to River, Florence Indian Film Festival 2011. The festival will open with Bengali film Chaplin directed by Anindo Bandopadhyay.
The festival will screen Satyajit Ray‘s documentary on Rabindranath Tagore along with his films Ghare Baire and Teen Kanya. Other films on India include Himself He Cooks by Valerie Berteau and Philippe Witjes of Belgium and Nataraja by Filippo Carli of Italy among others.
Some of the other films that will screen at the festival are Shoaib Mansoor‘s Bol, Tapan Sinha‘s Khudito Pashan, Surjo Deb‘s Adda:Calcutta, Kolkata, Zoya Akhtar‘s Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, Kavalmaniyam Jagannathan‘s Videokaaran, Q‘s Gandu and Onir‘s I Am.
Several short films will also be screened at the festival including shorts from FTII and Whistling Woods International.
River to River, Florence Indian Film Festival will be held from 2 to 8 December in Florence, Italy.
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.
