Hindi
Film on India’s premier music event Sunburn in offing
MUMBAI: Viacom18 Motion Pictures and Percept Pictures are jointly producing Sunburn‘ into ‘Sunburn – The Movie, the path breaking extension of India‘s premier music event Sunburn.
To be produced and creatively mentored by Phantom Films and Anurag Kashyap, Sunburn – The Movie is a film shot entirely at the festival – realtime!
While Sunburn‘s music has always been the festival‘s mainstay, the film‘s music is all set to raise the bar as well, with the super talented Amit Trivedi set to take the Sunburn experience several notches higher, an official statement said.
Commenting on the new initiative, Percept Limited & Inceptor of Sunburn joint managing director Shailendra Singh said, “Sunburn is a global dance music festival – its fans go beyond the ones who have attended the festival. We were live in over 100 countries this year with 1,00,000 attendees. Fans have relished the experience and we thought of enhancing the same through cinema. With like minded partners Viacom 18 and Phantom we want take this to the next level. We have produced the first GLOCAL brand out of India – produced locally sold globally.”
Added Viacom18 Motion Pictures‘ COO Vikram Malhotra, “Sunburn is by far the biggest cult event in the country. The way this brand has grown over the last 4 years is extraordinary. We are delighted to partner with Percept and Phantom to extend this power brand into an exhilarating cinematic experience, making it the first festival film in the world.”
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.
