Hindi
Nasik Film Festival rolls out on 23 March
MUMBAI: The three-day Nasik Film Festival is schedule to begin on 23 March. This year, the festival is dedicated to Dadasaheb Phalke, father of the Indian cinema.
The event boasts of a line-up of events that include documentaries, award winning short films, workshops, competitions, intellectual discussions combined with wine appreciation workshops, visiting vineyards and attending wine and cheese festivals.
The festival, now in its fourth year, is supported by Government of Maharashtra and Film Division of India.
It will also include screenings from the European Film Academy‘s award winning package, French films by the Alliance de Francaise and poetic documentaries from the Baltic region of Europe.
The festival will also see conversations with personalities like Shyam Benegal, Sudhir Mishra, Prahlad Kakkar, VG Samant and Javed Jafferi, on animation films, art of stills, adapting to changing audience and others.
The festival will also conduct a first of a kind workshop by the Indian Documentary Foundation, wherein 16 participants, divided in teams, will produce a documentary on their perspective of Nasik city in four days.
Renowned documentary filmmaker from Lithuania, Audrius Stonys, will guide them through the schedule from ideation to screening.
The Nasik film festival will honour Manoj Kumar with the Lifetime Achievement Award. Three films of Dev Anand will be screened in the retrospective section.
The festival will unveil the ‘First Look‘ of Pahlaj Nihalani‘s Avatar.
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.
