Hindi
Mira Nair’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist opens Venice Film Festival
MUMBAI: Mira Nair’s latest film The Reluctant Fundamentalist opened the 69th Venice Film Festival. The movie was applauded with a standing ovation.
When Nair was asked as to what inspires her as a creative person, she said, “There is one film that has inspired me for decades—the only film in the world I wished I had directed, a path breaking film that taught me to show both sides of a conflict with equal intelligence, pain and love. This is Gillo Pontecorvo’s great classic about the fight for Algerian Independence: The Battle of Algiers.”
Incidentally, after the screening of the movie, Pontecorvo’s widow sought Nair out and said, “I am Gillo Pontecorvo’s widow, and I have come to tell you that Gillo lives in you.”
Mira Nair’s film will release in India on 17 May. The motion picture is a touching and engaging story of a young man chasing corporate success on Wall Street. Post September 2011 tragedy in America, he finds himself embroiled in a conflict between his american dream, a hostage crisis, and the enduring call of his family‘s homeland.
The film stars Kate Hudson, Kiefer Sutherland, Liev Schreiber, Riz Ahmed, Shabana Azmi and Om Puri.
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.
