Hindi
Four Indian films including ‘Mary Kom’ make it to Hawaii India Spotlight
NEW DELHI: Four Indian films have made it to the 34th Hawaii International Film Festival this year in a Spotlight on India section.
The festival which has been shifted to 30 October and will continue till 9 November is made up of four Hindi titles: modern Hamlet retelling Haider, boxing biopic Mary Kom, crime drama Titli and Bang Bang, the official Bollywood remake of Knight and Day (2010).
The festival will open with Ishii Yuya’s The Vancouver Asahi about a baseball team of second-generation Japanese in the 1930’s.
The festival’s Director of Programming Anderson stated, “It is rare to see the World War II internment camp experience through the lens of Japanese nationals in a major motion picture”. The film stars Tsumabuki Satoshi.
The festival will have films from 45 countries, including more than 60 films from Asia. With the Vancouver festival downsizing its Asian lineup, Hawaii is now one of the largest showcases for Asian cinema in North America.
The festival’s main Asian lineup is programmed in spotlight sections dedicated to recent films from seven regions: Japan, South Korea, China (including Hong Kong), Taiwan, India, Philippines and Southeast Asia (excluding Philippines).
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.
