Hindi
Love Lies And Seeta releasing on 18 May
MUMBAI: Producer Chandra Pemmaraju is gearing up to release Love Lies And Seeta under the banner of Movie Depot on 18 May.
This Indo–American independent film is about falling for a girl who doesn’t believe in love and interweaving friendships that cross-traditional borders of ethnicity. The movie follows the lives of the male leads – Rahul, Tom, and Bhavuk, who have all independently met the beautiful Seeta at different stages in their lives.
As the friendship amongst the three men grow, a chance encounter with Seeta makes them realise they all have fallen in love with the same woman. They reach out to their friends outside the group to cope with falling in love with Seeta. The love triangle envelops the characters and their friends. The city backdrop depicts a New York summer and makes its urban-natural beauty an important supporting character.
“The idea was simple to make the first of its kind fun, young urban romantic comedy in an extremely low budget yet with international standards. The movie took a year and half to make. I enjoyed the process of writing the story as well as making the movie, and I hope the Indian audience will like the movie as much as I liked making it,” said Premraju in a statement.
Shot in 50 plus different locations in just 28 days, using the revolutionary red camera, the film has been shot completely in Manhattan and Brooklyn NY with an ensemble cast of Indian and American actors. The film aims to appeal to the hipster generation of moviegoers as well as all the audience who love cinema.
Chandra Pemmaraju is a film writer, producer and director of Indian origin based out of New York. The film is to be distributed by Cinemax Motion Pictures in India.
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.
