Hindi
Excel Home Videos wins 2 Fox Marketing Awards
MUMBAI: Home entertainment major Excel Home Videos earned two Awards for India at the Twentieth Century Fox Awards for Excellence in Home Entertainment.
This is the first time that an Indian company has received honours from Fox for the home entertainment segment. The company swept two of the four awards for India, including ‘Highest Growth’ and ‘Best Theatrical Synergy”.
The other two awards were won by Hong Kong. The award ceremony held at Bali, Indonesia witnessed nine countries, including South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, among others, competing for top honours.
The award for ‘highest growth’ was for the 67 per cent growth the company achieved in the last fiscal. Excel Home Videos, which owns the largest DVD catalogue in the country and enjoys a retail penetration of over 12,000 retail outlets, attributes the success to its product quality, technical brilliance and innovative marketing. Apart from Fox, Excel also represents other entertainment majors like Walt Disney, MGM, Merchant Ivory, HIT, Shringar, and EA amongst others in India.
The award of ‘Best Theatrical Synergy’ was conferred for the pioneering efforts of the company in successfully using theatrical synergy to promote Home Video Products. Says MN Kapasi, MD, Excel Home Videos, “Merely coinciding the release hasn’t achieved us the feat. The entire effort has been well coordinated with effective pricing, DVD visibility in stores, innovative advertising, among other aspects”. The experiment began with the DVD re-release of the Brad Pitt starrer ‘Fight Club‘ last February. The English DVD did roaring business with the pre-launch hype of the Sohail Khan starrer. The success was later duplicated with a string of Marvel titles including X – Men 1, X – Men 2, X – Men 3, Fantastic Four: The Rise of the Silver Surfer, Elektra, and Daredevil, among others.”
The Awards, in its third year, were presented by Richard Crook, vice president, International Licensees, 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment.
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.
