Hindi
Hansal Mehta is best director, Vikram repeats feat to become best actor in NYIFF
NEW DELHI: Hansal Mehta has won the best director award for Shahid at the 13th annual New York Indian Film Festival (NYIFF) while Anumati by Gajendra Ahire was declared the Best Film.
The veteran Vikram Gokhale received the best actor award for Anumati, the film which got him the same award at the National Film Awards earlier this month.
The veteran Deepti Naval was declared the Best Actress for Listen Amaya while Suraj Negi won the Best Child Actor for Hansa.
Dr. Biju won the Best Screenplay for Color of Sky.
The Only Real Game by Mirra Bank was declared the Best Documentary while Khaana by Cary Sawhney won the Best Short film.
Shahid is based on the life of slain human rights activist and lawyer Shahid Azmi. Anumati revolves around a retired teacher‘s attempt to save his dying wife.
Filmistaan by Nitin Kakkar, which had won the best Hindi film award at the National Film Awards on 3 May, was the closing film of the New York Festival. It stars Sharib Hashmi, Kumud Mishra, Gopal Datt, and Inaamulhaq. Dekh Tamasha Dekh which was also a winner at the National Film Awards opened the Festival. It is directed by Feroz Abbas Khan.and stars Satish Kaushik, Tanvi Azmi, Sudhir Pandey, Vinay Jain, Sharad Ponkshe, Ganesh Yadav, Apoorva Arora, and Alok Rajwade.
The Festival screened Uday Shankar‘s Kalpana made in 1948 to mark a centenary of Indian cinema, while the restored version of Garam Hawa by M S Sathyu was also screened.
The Festival had a section on mobile phone cinema, Human Rights cinema. There were separate sections of Bengali and Marathi films.
Presented by the Indo-American Arts Council, the annual festival was held from 30 April to 4 May. Other films included ‘Midnight‘s Children‘ and ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist‘ by Mira Nair.
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.
