Hindi
Indian short on Tarapur power plant gets Yellow Oscar
NEW DELHI: The documentary ‘High Power’ by Pradeep Indulkar on the Tarapur power plant in Maharashtra received the Best Short Documentary award at the 3rd International Uranium Film Festival of Rio Janeiro 2013 in the cinema of the Modern Art Museum (MAM) recently.
Six Films from six countries – Russia, India, USA, Estonia, Jordan and Germany – were honored with the Uranium Film Festival‘s trophy, the Yellow Oscar.
The festival screened 52 documentaries and fiction movies from 19 countries.
The 2013 finalised documentary "High Power" gives worthwhile impulses to current "nuclear question" in India.
Pradeep Indulkar, director of "High Power", is an Indian engineer who has been working during 12 years for India‘s nuclear programme.
High Power tells the disturbing story of the local population of Tarapur in the state of Maharashtra, where India‘s first nuclear power plant was constructed in the 1960s. Local fishermen families lost their land, their fishing grounds and health.
"It is an important, nuclear discussion stimulating documentary, that comes at the right time, when thousands of people in South-India struggle against a new nuclear power plant at Kudankulam is the state of Tamil Nadu", says Festival director Norbert G Suchanek. "High Power is Pradeep Indulkar‘s first documentary, and we hope to see more documentaries by him in future."
"Apart from all the sorrows and distress my film brought to you, this is a golden moment of my life as a filmmaker", said Indulkar during the Award Ceremony in the Museum of Modern Art cinema. "At this moment I remember and thank all my friends and well-wisher who helped in making of High Power. I also thank to all those Indian people who contributed even a smallest amount to make our trip happened. I thank you all who supported this film with as a great audience. I thank Rio, I thank Brazil and I accept this award on behalf of all the nuclear affected people of Tarapur and I dedicate this award to all those farmers and fishermen who lost their land, home and life for nuclear power plant."
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.
