Hindi
First Bengali film festival in London from 18 May
MUMBAI: For the first time ever, a three-day Bengali film festival titled Pratidin Probash Parboni Film Festival has been organised in London from 18 to 20 May.
The festival has been organised to give the expatriate Bengalis a fair idea about the contemporary changes, turns and twists in the Bengali film industry, which is on a resurgent phase. The festival will mark the world premiere of debutante director Partho Sen’s Balukabela.Com.
The 3 day film festival will feature finest array of contemporary Bengali cinema. Films that would be featured in the festival are Egaro on 18 May, Balukabela.com, Aparajita Tumi and Elar Char Adhyayall on 19 May, Royal Bengal Rahasya, Bhooter Bhobishyat and Nobel Chor on 20 May.
The event will have the presence of names like Paoli Dam, Parambrata Chattopadhyay, Swastika Mukherjee, Locket Chatterjee, Rudranil Ghosh and Anirudhya Roy Chowdhury.
“Next year we have plans to make it more elaborate, including the mainstream movies, which are also assuming a new glossy look with shots in foreign locales. There is a sizeable Bengali population about 250000 in UK spread over places like Edinnburgh, Glasgow, Bermingham and next year we would shuffle the film screenings at different venues to reach everybody,” said Sayantan Das, one of the organisers.
The film festival has been sponsored by Universal Success Enterprises (USE), is powered by Camellia Group and the TV partner is Channel 10.
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.
