Hindi
I Am Kalam bags three Silent River film fest awards
MUMBAI: Nila Madhab Panda‘s I AM Kalam has bagged three prestigious awards – for best feature film, best director and best child actor (Harsh Mayar) at the Silent River Film Festival (SRFF).
Said director Nila Madhab Panda, “I only got to know about our film‘s hat-trick of triumphs at the Silent River festival when the Festival‘s director Kalpana Singh-Chitnis called up to tell me about it. It‘s sad I couldn‘t be there. But the film has already been to 50 festivals and won 14 international awards.”
The plot revolves around Chhotu, a poor Rajasthani boy, who is inspired by the life of former President of India, A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, and his strong desire to learn to read.
The film that premiered at the 63rd Cannes Film Festival on 12 May has been showcased in various film festivals and has bagged various awards.
Panda sees the film‘s latest triumph at the Silent Film festival as a victory for independent cinema. “No one thought it was possible for me to complete I Am Kalam. I had to sell our home to make the film. It was traumatic for my family. But finally it was worth it.”
The Silent Film Festival at Irvine, California celebrates and honours independent cinema.
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.
