Hindi
Indian short wins ‘Best Film Award’ in Serbia, now slated for screening in Kerala
NEW DELHI: The best film award at the seventh Cinema City International Film Festival in Serbia has gone to an Indian short, Stray Dogs.
The 19-minute short film by Atanu Mukherjee won the IBIS statuette for the best film.
The film won in the “Up to 10,000 Bucks” competition programme, meant for low-budget films that screened 32 films of all genres this year.
The Cinema City International Film Festival was held in Novi Sad in Serbia from 21-28 June 2014.
“Stray Dogs uses a minimalistic and well-aimed dramatic structure to speak of system-imposed relation between the privileged and the oppressed, the mercurial nature of such relations, and discovery of a man outside the dynamics of hierarchy,” the Jury stated.
Set in Pune, Stray Dogs tells the story of Tony, an employee in the Flex Manufacturing industry whose freedom is always dominated by hierarchy. Being suppressed by his boss, he can’t keep his commitments and priorities in his personal life. Gradually he starts performing the role of a manipulator and wants to see the effect of the same. Finally he confronts the reality of this vicious circle, where everybody is trapped within, including a stray dog.
The film is also scheduled for a screening at the International Documentary & Short Film Festival of Kerala in July.
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.
