Hindi
Kshay voted best narrative feature at IFFLA
MUMBAI: Of late, a spate of India-made films has been doing the rounds at international film festivals and has been suitably rewarded.
One such film is director Karan Gour‘s Kshay, an intense psychological study of a woman‘s obsession with an unfinished statue of the Goddess Lakshmi. Shot in stark black-and-white, the film has travelled to four international film festivals already with many more in the offing. The film recently won the ‘Grand Jury Prize for Best Narrative Feature‘ at the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles (IFFLA).
Said producer Shaan Vyas,” Kshay has taken us four years to complete and was made with a two-man crew at most times: the director Karan Gour and the Director of Photography Abhinay Khoparzi. The film is about obsession made by an obsessive person and, more importantly, the larger issues it addresses of materialistic obsession and blind faith in religion that are very relevant in today‘s world.”
And the fact that it probably has the lowest budget of all the feature films at the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles makes this win that much more exciting. “It reinforces our belief that you don‘t need big budgets to make a good movie. Four years of Karan and Abhinay‘s relentless effort is paying off now,” said Vyas.
Other award winners were Gemma Atwal‘s Marathon Boy that got the award for best documentary while an honorable mention went to Rajan Khosa‘s Gattu.
The award for the best short went to Neeraj Ghaywan‘s Noise (Shor) and Ravi Kapoor‘s The 5, while actress Meera Simhan won an award for her performance in Sujata, each receiving an honorable mention.
Rajan Khosa took home a second honour of the evening when Gattu won the Audience Choice Award for Best Feature while the Audience Choice award for best documentary went to Gotham Chopra for his Decoding Deepak. Anirban Roy won the Audience Choice Award for best short film for Audacity (Aashprodha), according to a release.
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.
