Hindi
Life! Camera Action bags top recognition at Nevada Intl fest
MUMBAI: New York based director Rohit Gupta‘s film Life! Camera Action has lapped up the Platinum Reel Award for the Best Narrative Feature Film 2011, the highest recognition at the Nevada International Film Festival 2011 held in Las Vegas.
Challenging and thought provoking, Life! Camera Action…takes an unflinching look at the complexities of a girl‘s tolerance and persistence in a journey to follow her dreams in a diverse melting pot set up.
Life! Camera Action is a story of a young Indian-American woman Reina‘s journey, who sets off to pursue a career in filmmaking against the wishes of her family and as she tries to make ends meet, she begins to seen another dream – to prove to her parents that her drive for her dream is sincere.
She is of the belief that while being born with a personality may be an inherent gift from one‘s parents, to live as a personality is an achievement of our own and a return gift to the parents.
The film features Dipti Mehta, Shaheed Woods, Noor Naghmi, John Crann, Subodh Batra amongst others.
The Nevada International Film Festival is the Silver State‘s annual celebration of the best in American and international cinema, bringing together independent filmmakers, growing audiences and the film industry professionals who make it all possible.
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.
