Hindi
Jalpari sent to the Oscars as direct entry
MUMBAI: Critically acclaimed film Jalpari – The Desert Mermaid has been submitted as a direct entry for the Oscars.
Ultra Distributors CMD Sushilkumar Agrawal said, "In all, 17 films were competing to be sent as India‘s official entry for the foreign film category at the Oscars. Every film had a potential in some way or the other way to compete for the Oscars, but unfortunately only one film can go as an official entry from India. The original story and concept is the USP of our film. The blazing subject, the treatment of the film and the powerful performances has the potential to compete to the Oscars. So we decided to submit our film as a direct entry for the Academy Awards."
Jalpari… is directed by Nila Madhab Panda director of award winning I Am Kalam. The film deals with the various predicaments that a girl child encounters in rural India and also addresses the divide between rural and urban India. The film depicts India‘s national shame ‘female foeticide‘ in a lighter way, without getting preachy.
The distributor has submitted the film to the Academy of Motion Pictures and its team will shortly visit US for promotion of the film and it exhibition.
Recently Jalpari… received the Audience Choice Award at the Minsk International Film Festival in Belarus and selected as an official entry for International Film Festival in Montreal that will take place in March next year and many other international film festivals.
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.
