Hindi
LA India Film Council announces LA-India Connect contest
MUMBAI: In its endeavour to encourage creativity and ideas from film students in India and Los Angeles, the LA India Film Council has announced a unique online short film competition titled LA – India Connect.
LA – India Connect will provide an opportunity to students to showcase their imagination, vision and story-telling ability by making a short film based on the ‘Hollywood – Bollywood‘ theme.
Participants will be judged on their ability to create a film that bypasses geographical boundaries and appeals to audiences everywhere. Films must be no more than ten minutes duration. The winners of the competition, from India and Los Angeles, will each receive a cash prize of USD$1,000 and an opportunity to gain experience with a leading production company.
The short film entries will be made available to view via the website: www.1takecontests.com. Viewers will be able to vote for their favourite film, and the winning film will receive the “Most Popular FilmAward.”
Additionally, every participant will get an opportunity to generate revenue from their film through Pocket Films, a short film division of 1takemedia.com, India‘s leading aggregator and distributor of alternate content.
The competition will be judged by a jury of high-profile film industry representatives from Los Angeles and India, including Shekhar Kapur, Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra, Mahesh Bhatt, Nagesh Kukunoor, Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) director DJ Narain, Whistling Woods International dean Ravi Gupta, Andhra Pradesh Film Chamber of Commerce president D Suresh Babu, UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television dean Teri Schwartz, and MovieLabs president and CEO Steve Weinstein.
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.
