Hindi
IFP rings in fifteen years of creativity and culture
MUMBAI: Fifteen and fabulous! India Film Project (IFP) is all set to celebrate its milestone 15th edition, returning to Mumbai’s iconic Mehboob Studios on 29 and 30 November for a weekend bursting with stories, art, and unfiltered creativity.
What started as a spark between a few passionate creators has now grown into the world’s largest festival celebrating creativity x culture, a global platform where filmmakers, writers, designers, musicians, and dreamers come together to create, collaborate and reimagine storytelling.
This year’s line-up is nothing short of stellar. The jury features cinematic heavyweights and creative icons including Dibakar Banerjee, Sheeba Chaddha, Hariharan, Bilal Siddiqi, Santhy Balachandran, Ravi Jadhav, Kanu Behl, Mukesh Chhabra, and Gajesh Mitkari, among others.
At the festival’s heart lie the 50 hour creative challenges, IFP’s signature event where imagination meets the ticking clock. From filmmaking and music to design, photography, writing, and performing arts, this year’s challenges drew over 40,000 participants from 350 cities across 23 countries, a testament to IFP’s ever-growing creative tribe.
Reflecting on the milestone, IFP founder Ritam Bhatnagar shared, “What began as a small dormitory idea is now one of the world’s biggest celebrations of creativity. Fifteen years later, IFP continues to be that space where creative people come together, experiment, and grow.”
For filmmaker Dibakar Banerjee, being part of the jury felt like coming full circle. “Storytelling thrives on curiosity, and that’s what IFP embodies. Fifteen years in, it still surprises and inspires.”
Echoing the sentiment, Sheeba Chaddha added, “There’s a rare joy in being part of IFP. It’s a space that lets artists express freely and evolve without boundaries.”
Over the years, IFP has hosted over 1.2 lakh creators, 1400 speakers, and creative legends like Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Mira Nair, Vicky Kaushal, and Javed Akhtar, proving that it’s not just a festival, but a movement.
This November, IFP once again promises two unforgettable days where every idea, big or small, finds its spotlight. So if creativity runs in your veins, Mehboob Studios is the place to be.
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.
