Hindi
IDPA Awards for 2010 show variation in creativity in short films
NEW DELHI: ‘A Drop of Sunshine‘ by Aparna Sanyal on disability and an advertising short on ‘Adidas‘ by Uzer Khan and Sebastian Narsing have won the highest number of awards in the annual Indian Documentary Producers Association (IDPA) Awards for 2010.
While ‘A Drop of Sunshine‘ won five awards including best film on the theme of disability, the ‘Adidas‘ short received four including one for special effects. Other films to win more than one award were ‘Visible Bra Straps‘ by Ajitesh Sharma, ‘Inshallah, Football‘ by Ashvin Kumar, and the commercial ‘Airtel‘ by Uzer Khan.
E Suresh and the team of Eekasaurus won as many as seven awards for different films, while institutions like the Film and Television Institute of India, Pune, the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute of India, Kolkata, the Whistling Woods International of Mumbai, the National Institute of Design of Ahmedabad, and the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai also won awards.
72 films have won Gold, Silver or Certificate of Merit in 26 categories presented for 2010, thus increasing the number of categories over 2009. The awards are being presented in Mumbai on 30 October.
Some of the categories were Disability, Environment, Advertising films, public service, short fiction, animation, special effects, student films, and technical awards like editing, cinematography and script-writing.
The winning film for environment is ‘Faith revisited‘ by Ishani K Dutta which explores how religion can be used to cleanse the environment, while senior filmmaker Umesh Aggarwal won the top award for his film ‘Annadata – Food for thought‘ in the non-fiction (under thirty minutes) category. The short fiction in animation went to ‘Fisher Women Trailer‘ by E Suresh of Studio Eeksaurus, while the short fiction award went to ‘Lonely Hearts‘ by Srijith Paul. ‘The Banana Pandit‘ by students of Whistling Woods International received the student award in the animation category.
The films were seen in Mumbai and Delhi for each category by separate juries comprising over 35 eminent members who have excelled in their respective fields.
The IDPA has been collaborating in organising the Mumbai International Film Festival for shorts, documentary and animation films organised by the Films Division, the Short Film Center at IFFI every year, and the Chhota Cinema here that help promote the documentary movement.
The IDPA is one of the oldest film associations set up as a trust in 1956. It has been guided since its birth in 1956 by a galaxy of member filmmakers and producers from Satyajit Ray, Paul Zils, Shyam Benegal, Saeed Akhtar Mirza, Manmohan Shetty and others, many of whom started their careers with short films. Members of the IDPA have won several Awards including those given by international agencies including the United Nations.
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.
