Hindi
India Film Project ropes in Ketan Mehta as jury member
MUMBAI: Filmmaker Ketan Mehta has been roped in as a jury member of the India Film Project 2015, which will be held in Ahmedabad from 18 – 26 September, 2015.
The film festival expects close to 15,000 filmmakers across 20 countries to participate in this year’s festival. In last four years, more than 21,000 filmmakers have been a part of IFP, and made 1500 films.
Mehta said, “I’m delighted to be a part of the jury at IFP. It will be a great experience to judge the upcoming talent. I think the concept is unique and I look forward to see the great work done by all the passionate movie makers in just 50 hours.”
“Not many people get a chance to turn their dreams into reality and I feel great that we are able to help all those through IFP platform. We have created a community of short filmmakers and not just contestants and this is our biggest successes. Each time we feel the same adrenaline rush organising this festival and looking forward to this year’s fest,” said IFP founder – director Ritam Bhatnagar.
IFP gives a platform to cinema lovers to showcase their talent globally. It challenges one to script, shoot, edit and submit a short film in just 50 hours once the theme is announced.
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.
